TOPIC: IS THE EFF THE PARTY OF FASCISM IN A DEMOCRATIC SOUTH AFRICA?: AN ESSAY.
“There are many who do not know they are fascist but will find out when the time comes”. Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls.
INTRODUCTION.
Paul Trewhela, an author, essayist, political commentator and former political activist, opened up his Politicsweb article ‘Africa and the post-imperial British media and academic class’, which appeared on 01 December 2014, with this beautiful and powerful paragraph:
“It’s a curious thing, the post-imperial British media and academic class. One of its great phobias has been to investigate too closely the Cold War drama in southern and central Africa, to which it was emotionally, intellectually and often professionally transfixed. Commitment and engagement, yes! Proper investigative research, well, no…not the done thing, is it?”.
Unfortunately, the latest offering from this questionable post-imperial British gift that never stops giving regarding southern and central Africa comes from none other that the former British High Commissioner to South Africa, Robin Renwick. His book ‘Mission to South Africa’ firmly places him within, aligns with, and considerably extends this sordid emotional, intellectual and even professional post-imperial British attachment to and morbid obsession with southern and central Africa, which are rightly and justifiably decried by Paul Trewhela.
Which is a sad thing to note, really.
You would have expected better from a British official who for four years observed South Africa’s fragile political transition in the late 1980s and early 1990s from the comfort of the astonishing diplomatic opulence that is the gilded, chauffer-driven, golden-spoon-in-the-mouth and highly pampered life of a high-ranking British diplomat in a fellow Commonwealth member country of South Africa.
It is therefore the right thing to do to compliment Andrew Donaldson for his excellent review of Renwick’s book ‘Mission to South Africa’. From the review provided by Donaldson, it does seem like Robin Renwick’s book brims with some dubious and outlandish assertions, thinly backed by research or empirical evidence in some instances, about the political events and personalities during the era of our country’s precarious transition from apartheid to democracy, whilst also distinguished by rare, penetrative and deep understanding of South Africa’s political landscape at the time. (See Politicsweb article ‘Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid’, 24 February 2015).
As the UK ambassador to South Africa, Renwick was but one of many dramatis personae in the drama about South Africa’s transition to democracy. And for sure he was not a minor player. His role was unique and powerful as the UK’s official representative to South Africa, given the UK’s centuries-old and deeply troubled, as well as very bloody, colonial, apartheid-era and transition-to-democracy involvement in the turbulent periods of South Africa’s history.
His assertions still carry a dramatic irony nonetheless. This should always be born in mind. But they certainly cannot be ignored by South Africans, by the Britons and by anyone interested in SA-UK bilateral relationship.
Perhaps the most outlandish and dubious of Robin Renwick’s claims in the book is that the former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, or The Iron Lady as she became known to many around the world, was determined to see the end of apartheid. Now come on!
Donaldson quoted Renwick as writing about Thatcher that:
“She wanted to get rid of it, to help bury it”, in reference to apartheid and Margaret Thatcher’s attitude to it.
To tens of millions of then oppressed black and progressive South Africans, Thatcher came across as the West’s biggest defender of the racist apartheid dictatorship and of the apartheid prime minister PW Botha and his predations and brutalities against blacks, especially with regard to Thatcher’s indefatigable campaign to defeat any and all Commonwealth Summit actions against the apartheid rulers, and most infamously so at the Nassau Commonwealth summit. Any false pretense which Thatcher ever had that she “wanted to get rid of” apartheid, and “to bury it”, was itself gotten rid of and buried by her sickening lone-wolf diplomatic determination to block any decision by the Commonwealth leaders to impose further punitive measures against apartheid rulers like PW Botha.
What Margaret Thatcher desired to get rid of and to bury was South Africa’s anti-apartheid national liberation movement, for sure.
But where the overwhelmingly majority of South Africans, then and now, would agree with Robin Renwick’s assertion in his book is in his surprising but welcome characterization of apartheid leader PW Botha as “someone who was in fascist territory”.
Donaldson quotes Renwick as writing the following about PW Botha:
“I felt I was dealing with someone who was in fascist territory”.
The overwhelming majority of black and progressive South Africans agree that in PW Botha, aside from his minor positive measures like abolishing the pass laws, Group Areas Act and the Mixed Marriage Act, as well as in starting secret negotiations with Nelson Mandela in prison, we were in fact dealing with not just a vicious political bully and a white racist thug; not just dealing with a military psycopath and a heartless, remorseless and openly provocative white racist sociopath; but that we were in fact dealing with and confronted by South Africa’s own archetypical ruling white Fascist in a power position of ultimate executive authority, or “someone in fascist territory”, as Robin Renwick put it, and confronted by some political lunatic forever thirsty to shed the blood of innocent blacks, including through constant, unrestraint unleashing of crude, brute military and securocratic might of the apartheid state, to uphold a white supremacist, fascist ideology..
It is also opportune to compliment Robin Renwick too for reminding us about PW Botha’s political involvement with the white Afrikaaner fascist outfit, Ossewa Brandwag, which openly flirted and aligned with and staunchly supported Hitler’s Nazism in Germany and Mussolini’s Fascism in Italy.
Put in simple terms, this should mean that when we South Africans want to imagine what “someone in fascist territory” under conditions of our constitutional and democratic dispensation would look like, PW Botha should be the first person to come to mind. Because he was the real, Anno Domini fascist thing South Africa ever had, and hopefully, pray to God, will ever have.
Yes, white genocidal colonial conquest and racist Apartheid dictatorship did not just bring “civilization” to “black barbarians” of southern Africa, but also brought a racialist dictatorship and open white Fascism.
Against this background, it becomes clear that South Africa, in the person of PW Botha as its former prime minister and white Fascist head of state, is one of a handful of countries around the world which have had a Fascist as head of government or state. The other countries of the world which are in this rogue gallery of infamy would include of course Germany and Italy, but also Japan, Spain, Greece, Portugal as well as Chile under General Pinochet.
And so, you would think that, consequently, it would be easy, like a walk in the park, for South Africans to agree today as to what is Fascism, or who can legitimately and factually be regarded as a Fascist.
Not so fast, please.
It is not that easy. Not at all.
To establish such a national consensus, despite PW Botha having been “someone in fascist territory”, is as elusive as providing economic justice for all in post-apartheid South Africa.
Why is there this explosive national political discord and ideological conflict as to who in a democratic South Africa is a “Fascist”, or who is “someone in fascist territory”?
CHAPTER ONE.
In my Politicsweb article of 04 March 2013 under the heading ‘Where to the ANC Youth League post-Mangaung’, and in an attempt to provide some clarity to this vexatious question, I wrote:
“Nothing illuminates better the existential crisis of the ANCYL than the ease with which any political force in SA can today label the ANCYL as either ‘fascist’ or the facility with which SA commentators and opinion-makers can compare the (former) expelled ANCYL leader, Julius Malema, to either Hitler or Idi Amin or Emperor Bokassa or Benito Mussolini. (See Brendan Boyle’s The Times SA column ‘Politics, Policy and Power’ where he wrote an article entitled ‘Moral of the Juju show’, 07 February 2013, page 11).”
Recently on 20 February 2015 Politicsweb carried a piece by Jeremy Cronin, the SACP’s deputy general secretary and deputy Minister of Public Works, under the see-through and provocative title ‘Legislative disruptions: From the Nazis to the EFF’.
Cronin went on to write that:
“The Weimar Republic parliament was caught flat-footed by the onslaught of a dozen rowdy Nazi MPs back in 1928”, in an unflattering reference to the disruption by the EFF of the start of the 2015 SONA by president Jacob Zuma.
The crux of Cronin’s article was contained, I think, in this paragraph:
“Our own internationally hailed post-apartheid parliament was forged out of a common understanding that we were wrestling a democratic, multi-party space out of civil war and social division. Compared to other parliaments I have visited, our National Assembly has had a security light touch…Like the dozen Nazi MPs back in 1928, the EFF cohort has deftly exploited this reality. They are faithfully, if unwittingly, following Huber’s script of attempting to destroy ‘the parliament system from within through its own methods’ in spurious points of order, provoking evictions and perhaps over-reaction and then claiming victimhood”.
Although Cronin hedges his dynamite-laced statement against counter-arguments with several caveats and qualifications, such as “unwittingly” and “perhaps” and “like” and “deftly”, his message is as clear as it is unmistakable: He wants us to view the EFF as a fascist menace in the league, and of the logic, of “the dozen Nazi MPs in 1928” in Weimar Germany.
It is hard to think of a more scurrilous and execrable political and ideological imprecation against a political foe operating legally under conditions of democratic and constitutional legality, and permitted by our Independent Electoral Commission(IEC) to freely contest elections, as the EFF is in democratic South Africa, than this one Jeremy Cronin hurled at the EFF and Julius Malema.
It in fact amounts to a political blood libel, given the atrocious, genocidal and violent legacy of Hitler’s Nazis.
Our 1996 Constitution proscribes freedom of speech for inter alia hate speech and war propaganda. If it is true the EFF are Nazis, then they are running foul of our supreme law.
Thus Jeremy Cronin, by this accusation, has declared an ideological war to the bitter end against the EFF. It also means that Cronin believes that the EFF represents an immanent, imminent, direct and existential threat to the SACP. In this schema, for one to exist, the other must perish.
Clearly this idea of Cronin that the EFF’s parliamentary disruptions at the start of 2015 SONA are akin to the actions of “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928” reveals that he himself habors totalitarian confabulations about the EFF and its leader Julius Malema, where no compromise with the EFF can be entertained whatsoever.
This obviously is dangerous political and ideological territory, if so.
Indulging in what the Russian strategic military planners would call “masquerading”, and avoiding to directly accuse the EFF of being “fascist”, or “neo-fascist”, or its leader Julius Malema of being a “Nazi” or “Fascist”, Cronin seemed to forget that he was part of the SACP leadership collective that issued, through Blade Nzimande, the SACP’s general secretary, a public statement carried by Politicsweb on 30 November 2014, following the first time the EFF chanted “Pay back the money!” in our elected national parliament to disrupt president Jacob Zuma’s speech, and which public statement appeared under the heading ‘White DA brat-pack collaborating with neo-fascist EFF – SACP’.
This statement read in part:
“But now there is a new toxic reality. The EFF, a demagogic, neo-fascist, populist formation has made it clear that it is prepared to erode the legitimacy of hard-won institution as it advances, hell-bent, its egotistic agenda”.
It is not quite clear why Cronin back-peddled a bit from calling the EFF “neo-fascist” in his latest article on the matter. But the small concession by Cronin and his “masquerading” do not become, as Vladimir Lenin, in another context, would say, “a small detail that becomes decisive”.
The small concession is the big, decisive detail!
One grouping that has never hesitated, or pulled back, from name-calling the EFF is the public servant trade union NEHAWU. In the first of such an ideological salvo of NEHAWU name-calling the EFF as ‘proto-Fascist’, I responded with a Politicsweb piece of 17 September 2012 entitled “Malema the ‘Fascist’: A comment”, in which I bemoaned “…the ease with which elements in the SA white community and some SACP members and some COSATU unionists attach the term ‘Nazi’ or ‘Fascist’ or ‘proto-Fascist’, to Julius Malema…”
Matters have gotten more complicated since then, if also more fraught with danger.
In its latest cursing of the EFF and Julius Malema, NEHAWU released a statement in response to 2015 SONA on Politicsweb of 13 February 2015 under the heading ‘NEHAWU denounces loutish interjections by EFF fascists’. The statement in part read:
“It is pitiful to see a fascist organisation like EFF that thinks of itself as terribly radical and cutting edge undermining our democratic institution by indulging in shameless self-advertising and political striptease”.
[It seems in less than three years the EFF and Malema have graduated from being seen by NEHAWU as “proto-Fascists” to now being fully-fledged “EFF fascists”. NEHAWU does not provide any study course as to how this quick ripening happened. Similarly, the SACP does not explain how the EFF and Malema were “neo-fascist” in November last year and are today, as Jeremy Cronin puts it, like “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928”. How does this growth happen? Who genetically manipulated and modified the mutant and abhorrent ideological maturation and strain of the EFF and Malema “in the fascist territory?”]
And so, with NEHAWU’s statement which “denounces” the EFF’s “loutish interjections”, we have firmly entered the obscene language and ideological parlance of pornographic vulgarity, thanks to NEHAWU’s animus towards the EFF. This obviously creates a fog of confusion as to the real meaning of terms such as “proto-Fascist”, “neo-Fascist”, “Fascist”, “neo-Nazi” “proto-Nazis”, “Nazis” and “Nazi MPs in 1928”, and even the much-in-vogue swear term of “counter-revolutionary”.
Not only were the gloves off, it seems. Off too were the loin cloths that cover erogenous zones of one’s ideological enemies, so to speak. What a gross-out!
Whenever intense personal animosity towards a foe or religion or sex or vulgarity enters ideological contradictions, they per force almost always make such ideological contradictions to become irreconcilable, immiscible and thus irresoluble, all at once. Such irreconcilable, immiscible and irresoluble contradictions thus end up leading towards one direction only – a social explosion, or inter-party violence and militant rivalry, far away from the framework of a democratic, constitutional discourse.
The recent violent and bloody pitched clashes between members of the SACP and ANC in the Mpumalanga province of our country, beamed to the whole nation and the world by the SABC TV, is but one such possible violent and bloody incidents between the SACP and EFF in the future.
What is not quite clear is whether the intense contradictions and differences between the SACP and the EFF really reflect the contradictions in our society itself. It is not even clear whether they reflect, in the Marxist jargon, contradictions between social relations and modes of production.
It is however undeniable that they indeed do speak to deep, mutual personal animosities between the leaders of the respective parties.
The real irony is that both the SACP and EFF self-describe and self-market in our politics as “Marxist-Leninist”. But they have reserved their most intense animus not for South Africa’s national and petty bourgeoisie – especially white monopoly and foreign capital – but, lo and behold, for each other.
This reminds me of why, at the height of his humiliation and denunciation during China’s Cultural Revolution, China supreme leader, Chinese Communist Party stalwart and the architect of China’s remarkable economic transformation in the last three decades, Deng Xiaoping, advised that:
“Criticism should be well prepared. Facts must be checked, and presented in a calm and reasonable manner…Political questions must be resolved in a political manner”. (Quoted by Deng Rong, Deng Xiaoping’s daughter, in ‘Deng Xiaoping and the Cultural Revolution – a Daughter Recalls the Critical Years’, 2002, pages 14-15).
Unfortunately, in the political climate of the shrill and to-the-left-ideological-beauty-contest cacophony between the SACP and EFF nowadays, criticism, facts and opinions are not presented in a calm and reasonable manner. Often there is more heat than light in the conflict between the two.
The SACP and EFF should rather remember that George Orwell reminded us all that:
“The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, conman, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc, consists of words translated from Russian, German and French…”
Popular amongst the forces of the Left are also terms like “neo-Fascist”, “proto-Fascist”, “Fascist”, “neo-Nazi”, “Nazis”, “bourgeoisie”, “petty bourgeoisie”, “proletariat”, “AK 47”, “anarchist”, “inter alia”, “total victory”, “forward ever”, “semi-izhdat”, “propaganda”, “hegemony”, “ancien regime”, and “counter-revolutionary”, terms by and over which the SACP and EFF are battling against each other. This is another reminder of the Euro-centric origins of Marxism and Leninism, the most influential ideological strands among the forces of the Left worldwide, including on the SACP and EFF.
Perhaps the SACP and EFF’s more use of Afro-centric jargon peculiar to Africa and South Africa, including words such as “ubuntu”, “thandaza”, “uxolo”, “i’sonto”, “kgotso”, “lekgotla”, “rapela”, “tshwaraganang”, “saam werk”, “toenadering”, “vergadering”, “lief”, “make up and kiss”, “habari”, “maendeleo” and “simunye – we are one”, will help the two political formations to still their angry voices, mellow their hardened, ideological and unforgiving hearts, and maybe assist them to unclench their iron-fisted punches they are vigorously shaking, throwing and pointing at each other in angry mutual recrimination.
The SACP’s 30 November 2014 statement, which referred to the EFF as “neo-fascist”, pointed out to the growing synchronization, if not backroom collaboration and parliamentary coordination, between the EFF and what the statement termed ‘DA brat-pack’. And interestingly since the emergence of this ‘co-ordination’ between the ‘DA brat-pack’ and the EFF in parliament, what I referred to as “SA white community” in my Politicsweb piece of 17 September 2012, and what the SACP’s statement of 30 November 2014 referred to as ‘DA brat pack’, have suddenly ceased to harangue the EFF or Julius Malema as either Nazi, or Fascist, or proto-Fascist.
What occasioned, and thus can explain, this terminological back-peddling on the part of the “SA white community” and the “DA brat pack” regarding their erstwhile very hostile view of the EFF and Julius Malema? And what does this say about the opportunism, the malleability and the syncretic nature of South Africa’s muscular new liberalism, as represented by the DA and its leader Helen Zille, in their search for ultimate electoral and political power in democratic South Africa?
The big question is: Is it the EFF and or Julius Malema who have changed? Or is it the strategic political power and electoral calculus of the DA and Helen Zille at work here and which has necessitated change within the “DA brat pack” in our elected national parliament?
Or is it the SACP which is caught up in a time-warp-capsule since 2009, unable and unwilling to update its ideological hostility towards, and misplaced understanding, of the “radicalness” of the politics of Julius Malema, firstly as the ANCYL radical leader, and subsequently the founder and the leader of the EFF?
Or is Julius Malema succeeding in making what the SACP sees as his “neo-fascist” streak to be more palatable and useful to, or hidden from, certain powerful elements of our society? Is Malema duping his over a million voters who elected his EFF into our national parliament and some of our provincial legislatures in last year’s national elections?
To compound matters more, and to confound us all even further, president Jacob Zuma, as the leader of our democratic Republic, of the Tripartite Alliance, (which includes the SACP of Blade Nzimande and Jeremy Cronin), and leader of the ruling ANC, went out of his way, in his Response to 2015 SONA, to specifically warmly, and in an unprecedented and salutary way, compliment Julius Malema for his (Malema)’s “constructive engagement with” his (president Zuma’s) 2015 SONA, thus publicly exulting him in our elected and democratic parliament, or what Jeremy Cronin calls “the democratic, multi-party space”. And the person president Zuma exulted as such has been compared by Cronin to “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928”.
Was president Jacob Zuma thus praising “someone in fascist territory”, to borrow Robin Renwick’s expression? Was the president praising what the SACP once termed “neo-fascist”? Was president Zuma appeasing the man who lead what NEHAWU describes as “EFF fascists”?
Are Julius Malema and the EFF really worthy of president Jacob Zuma’s high-to-the-heavens exultation in our elected national parliament? Does the president think that the EFF is a party he can do business with, to paraphrase former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s initial description of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbaschev, despite the growing, yawning ideological chasm between the ruling ANC and EFF?
Is the EFF the party of Fascism in a democratic South Africa?
Which is which? What is what? Who is fooling who?
Or is the joke on us as SA voters and adults?
George Orwell once said that:
“The word Fascism has no meaning except in as far as it signifies something undesirable”
He further stated, more germane to our discussion about whether Malema and the EFF are “neo-fascist” or “proto-fascist” or “Nazis of 1928”:
“…words are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgment”.
Absoluuuuuuutely!
One of the ANC’s all-time great, undisputed and organic intellectuals, Pallo Jordan, once offered a very brilliant, blistering, enervating and cogent critique of the SACP leader Joe Slovo’s historic, profound and path-blazing article ‘Has Socialism Failed?’.
In his intellectually awe-inspiring, incomparable, sublime and perhaps his best ever piece, Pallo Jordan stated, inter alia, that:
“Marxism prides itself in its ability to uncover the reality that lies hidden behind appearances. Marxists therefore cannot be content with expressions of shock, horror and condemnation: It is our task to explain what has led to the atrocities we condemn”. (See South African History Online, Pallo Jordan’s article “Crisis of Conscience in the SACP: Critical Review of Slovo’s ‘Has Socialism Failed?'”),
[NB: In his book ‘These Times – A decade of South African politics’, Ken Owen, the former editor of the Sunday Times SA, described the ANC’s Pallo Jordan as “an unusually interesting man who, unlike many ANC leaders, has a fine, well-trained mind”; 1992, page 256].
And so, the task is not to “be content” with just the opportunity “to express shock, horror and condemnation” in relation to what NEHAWU calls the “loutish interjections” and “striptease” of the EFF and Julius Malema’s alleged “neo-Fascism” or “proto-Fascism”. The task is to see what lies hidden behind the EFF’s red overalls, domestic maid dresses, the gumboots, the hard miners hats and its parliamentary behavior. The vital task and intellectual responsibility is “to uncover the reality that lies hidden behind appearances” of the EFF and Julius Malema, to quote Pallo Jordan.
Justice Pitso, South Africa’s former ambassador to Cuba, political commentator and public intellectual, in his article under the heading ‘A false conspiracy theory’, quoted Vladimir Lenin, the Russian revolutionary and founder of Soviet power, as cautioning thus against “a revolutionary phrase”:
“We must fight against the revolutionary phrase, we have to fight it, we absolutely must fight it, so that in some future time people will not say of us the bitter truth that a revolutionary phrase about a revolutionary war ruined the revolution”. (See The New Age, 25 October 2012, Opinion and Analysis, page 25).
Any revolutionary phrase which “ruins the revolution”, whether wielded by the SACP or EFF or anyone else, and when used to falsely hide or expose or promote real or ersatz Fascism in a democratic South Africa, must be uncovered behind appearances, in order for it to be defeated and buried for good.
There is no middle road about that, to paraphrase the title of SACP leader Joe Slovo’s most influential essay.
Is the now commonplace characterization of the EFF and Julius Malema as “neo-fascist” an instance of “a false political conspiracy theory”, to quote ambassador Justice Pitso?
CHAPTER TWO: THE TERM “FASCISM” AS A HIGHLY CONTESTED, DAMAGING BUT PERVASIVE SWEAR WORD IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN POLITICAL VOCABULARY OF TODAY.
That Jeremy Cronin is a leading SACP intellectual there can be no doubt. That he does not fear to raise difficult, controversial and even divisive issues for public discussion there is also no doubt.
His famous (some say infamous) two-part interview with Helena Sheehan, the Irish journalist, in 2001 and 2002, which was leaked and in which he warned the Thabo Mbeki-led ANC against the phenomenon of “Zanufication” of the ANC, is clear proof of Cronin’s intellectual courage. (See the SACP’s Umsebenzi Online of 06 April 2011).
He has also been very consistent in his critique of the “populism” of Julius Malema at least since 2009. At one point he even accused the ANC youth league and Julius Malema of supporting beneficiation of SA’s minerals because they were after “bling” and “jewellery”. (See SAPA, 22 November 2009).
He has in turn previously been accused by Julius Malema of seeking to be “a white political messiah” to black South Africa, which was a particularly stinging rebuke to a white South African who has dedicated his life to the liberation of South Africa’s black oppressed. (Ibid).
SACP leaders Jeremy Cronin and Blade Nzimande have also been at the forefront of the public discourse to out Julius Malema as “demagogic” and “a tendepreneur” par excellence. (See The Times SA, 13 June 2011).
On the other hand, Malema has in turn been quick to denounce the communist commitment of the two leaders, especially as regards what he (Malema) reckoned was the failure of these two SACP leaders to provide leadership to South Africa’s working class. He further accused them of having turned the SACP and COSATU into “lobby group” for deployment positions like mayorial positions. (See Thabo Mokone, ‘Malema knifes the SACP and Cosatu chiefs’, The Times SA, 14 June 2011).
The latest comparison of Malema with the Nazis of 1928 by Jeremy Cronin must therefore be seen against this bitter background. However, this particular comparison takes the poisoned and fraught relationship between Cronin and Malema, on the one hand, and between the SACP and EFF, on the other hand, to its lowest point ever.
Jeremy Cronin has also previously admitted that there was an element of “gossiping” during his interview with Helena Sheehan. By his own admission, it is not like he shies away from a “gossiping” session. It needs to be determined whether some of the denunciations he has leveled against Julius Malema and the EFF are not just glorified gossiping on his part, which he masks as impassioned political analysis. Cronin has also indirectly admitted to the tension that exists between him being a part of “the political Establishment”, – a deputy minister in the ANC-led government – on the one hand, and the need for him to speak “truth” to (and including media) power, as the leader of the SACP and the defender of the working class interests. In his 06 April 2011 Umsebenzi piece, he claimed that his deputy ministerial position in government has not dulled his “critical and self-critical abilities”.
But what then explains the fact that since 2009, when president Jacob Zuma ascended to power and up to date, neither Blade Nzimanda nor Jeremy Cronin, nor any other leader or member of the SACP, has authored and issued a no-holds-barred severe criticism of the Zuma ANC administration, the likes of what the SACP did under presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki with regard to what the SACP called “the 1996 Class Project”? Or indeed the likes of the devastating piece which ANC leader and Marxist Pallo Jordan penned against SACP leader Joe Slovo’s ‘Has Socialism Failed?”, in an open, transparent and lived intellectual experience of what China leader Mao Tse Tung encouraged when he exalted the Chinese masses to:
“Let a thousand flowers bloom. Let a hundred schools contend’.
What in the world then has “dulled” what Jeremy Cronin claimed were his “critical and self-critical abilities” since Zuma ANC (ZANC) hegemonic faction ascended to power in 2009 and made the SACP leaders like Blade Nzimande and Cronin part of the national Cabinet? Why has the SACP ceased fire in relation the job of exercising its “critical and self-critical abilities” as these, if still extant indeed, relate to the Zuma government, which has had, it should be pointed out, much more unprecedented allegations of mostly (unproven) scandal and malfeasance, as compared to previous ANC governments since 1994, for an example regarding the matter of the government’s upgrades at the Nkandla compound of president Zuma?
Curiously, it often seems that the first instinct of the SACP leaders like Jeremy Cronin is to come to the uncritical defense of president Zuma, whatever the merits or demerits of allegations, whilst going on a furious and ferocious ideological, majoritarian attack against any perceived slight from real and imagined foes such as the EFF and Julius Malema.
In my 30 October 2012 Politicsweb article under the heading “Jacob Zuma: Strong on affability, but weak on policy”, I pointed to the fact that the SACP has precisely failed to provide a very consistent, critical but constructive critique of the Zuma ANC (ZANC) administration, as if the SACP can switch on or off its tap of criticism of the performance of ANC administrations, depending on whether it fancies, or does not fancy, the ANC leaders in power.
The article, in part, stated:
“Even more startling is the SACP and COSATU’s complete lack of any consistent ideological critique of the class and political’orientation’…and nature of the Jacob Zuma government, or what others now mockingly refer to as the 2007 Polokwane Pirates’ Class of the Walking Wounded. That the SACP and COSATU have embedded themselves comfortably and firmly at the very centre of this power edifice, is no excuse for their failure to provide a coherent framework for ongoing ideological and political critique of the Zuma government”.
Three years later, neither the SACP nor COSATU has penned and published such a wanted and eagerly-awaited critique of the Zuma government they are tied to the hip to.
The highly acclaimed, persuasive and trenchant 17 December 2014 critique of the SACP by COSATU general secretary (GS), Zwelinzima Vavi, evidently done in his individual capacity, and not representative of the views of the whole COSATU leadership, and contained in his ‘Open letter to the leaders and members of the South African Communist Party’, has gone practically unresponded to substantially, except for a précis which promised a more substantive response at some unspecified time in the future, by the SACP and its leaders, despite earlier promises that this would be done niftily.
But when it comes to the EFF and Julius Malema, the SACP displays no such supine laziness to react or respond. Neither does the SACP turn the other cheek when slighted by either the EFF or Julius Malema. When the EFF disrupted the start of 2015 SONA, Jeremy Cronin penned his ‘Legislative disruptions: From Nazis to the EFF’ shortly thereafter. It was a response speed that was both amazing and refreshing. Here again, when his bluster guns are turned away from president Zuma and his Zuma ANC (ZANC) government, Jeremy Cronin, predictably and bug-eyed, regains his legendary and well-known “critical and self-critical abilities”.
[For my criticism and assessment of the EFF and Julius Malema, see my Politicsweb article ‘Julius Malema’s World War Z’ of 16 October 2013].
But why can’t Cronin be similarly nimble-footed with regard to a much-awaited SACP critique of the Zuma government, or the SACP’s response to the long, critical letter of Zwelinzima Vavi on the SACP?
What does this say about the SACP’s motives and motivation for attacking the EFF and Julius Malema?
It should be recalled that George Orwell said that “the word Fascism has no meaning except in as far as it signifies something undesirable” and that “words are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments”.
The SACP and Jeremy Cronin are certainly revealing a lot of “biased judgments” against the EFF and Julius Malema, especially as it relates to their use of the terms “neo-fascists”, “proto-fascist, “Fascist”, and the expression “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928”.
To fully appreciate how deleterious this ideological dereliction of duty on the part of the SACP and its leaders, in terms of what Karl Marx called a “severe criticism of all that exists”, in this case in relation to the Zuma administration, means, one has to look at how the SACP has been unable to reverse the damaging neoliberal precepts of the ANC’s signature long-term, strategic development programme, namely the National Development Plan (NDP). The NDP’s economic chapter, like its predecessor, GEAR, openly advances and advocates for economic neoliberalism, with nary a word of oppositional resistance from the SACP leaders serving in the Zuma government.
Cronin’s repeated assertion that the key agenda of the EFF, by calling for nationalization of mines, is to save struggling black mining moguls, is found not to be comprehensively dialectical and scientific. For an example he still needs to explain why Julius Malema at some point abruptly and unilaterally announced that the gold mines would not be nationalized because gold mining is expensive. (See news24, ‘Malema: Gold too expensive to nationalise’, 22 December 2013). What influence was brought to bear on Malema to do such a solitary, unilateral about-turn? Who brought to bear such effective influence on Malema to gain such a remarkable volte face in our politics’ infant terrible? For what gain for Malema and the EFF? What price tag is on Malema on the question of nationalization of mines? What will the EFF say when in the future platinum or diamond or iron ore or coal mining gets expensive? Will it abandon another of its radical nationalisation pillars? How did this new position of Malema affect those BEE gold mining moguls Cronin presumed were supportive of the EFF’s campaign for nationalisation of mines, in the hope that Malema would save their mining holdings from bankruptcy? Cronin di not provide clarity on these important issues. And, in any case, many of the BEE mining moguls, including some of those who own or part-own struggling mines, are fervent supporters and funders of the ruling ANC of president Zuma and the Zuma ANC (ZANC) government in which several SACP leaders serve as senior ministers and deputy ministers, including Cronin himself. Do these struggling BEE mining moguls so support the ANC because the ANC would save their struggling BEE mine shares as well? Or for what reason, according to Cronin’s logic, would they be supporting the ANC? At what point of supporting either the EFF or the ANC do these struggling BEE mining moguls become sponsors of the EFF’s radical economic agenda of nationalization of mines, just to save their struggling mines? Nary a word from Jeremy Cronin on these weighty conceptual and policy issues.
The SACP’s decision to locate itself in the proximity of the ANC’s power and patronage networks has been particularly damaging to its struggle against the politics of patronage (eg, Cronin’s warning against the Zanufication of the ANC under Thabo Mbeki), the reality and truth about which (i.e Zanufication of the ANC) the SACP should be speaking to any and all ANC factions in power, including the government of president Zuma. After all, the government’s department of public works is generally, even if sometimes unfairly, considered the most corrupt of government departments, because it deals with large amount of state property portfolio and tenders and public work programmes. Yet it is headed by two prominent Communists, namely Cronin himself, as deputy minister, and the SACP deputy chairman, and the former teacher and trade unionist, Thulas Nxesi as minister.
The more cynical of South Africa’s bitter and veteran anti-Communists, happy to take a swipe at Cronin and the SACP leadership, charge that there has actually been – horror of horrors – Zanufication of the Zuma government’s department of public works under two South African Communists, namely Thulas Nxesi and Jeremy Cronin!
So two negative dynamics are at work for the SACP here: Firstly, it has been woefully incapable of resisting the neoliberal offensive of the ANC NDP’s economic prescriptions; and secondly, it has located itself in the proximity of the ANC’s patronage networks, especially by heading the government’s department of public works.
For the SACP and its leaders like Jeremy Cronin, this situation too is a “toxic reality” (to quote Blade Nzimande’s 30 November 2030 statement on the EFF’s chant of ‘Pay back the money’ in parliament’).
Writing about a similar development in Zimbabwe, which also accounts for the current collapse of the Zimbabwean economy, Fay Chung, the former Chinese-Zimbabwean ZANU-PF freedom fighter, exile and Minister of Education, stated:
“The situation was exacerbated by the change in ZANU PF’s ideology from nominal socialism in 1992 to Structural Adjustment’s version of liberal capitalism. While Marxism-Leninism had already been abandoned by 1976, long before independence, nevertheless its rhetoric still lingered for a decade after independence. It also served an important function as a benchmark for measuring what was being done by government. The poor regarded socialism, however ill defined, as representing their interests”. (Fay Chung, Reliving the Second Chimurenga – Memories from Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle’, 2006, page 265).
Fay Chung further stated that:
“Structural Adjustment was interpreted by the ruling political class as licence to enrich itself. The first decade of independence had seen a small number of blacks becoming rich through property ownership rather than through industrialization. A small number had managed to link up with large multinational companies, which still continued to lever enormous political power. Structural Adjustment ushered in a period of increased corruption by the political class, which saw the opportunity to secure a large share of the economy through the political support they were able to give to the private sector ventures from outside…One phenomenon of patronage politics was that the masses could vote for the best patron who would provide the most for the community, irrespective of ideology or race”. (Ibid, pages 266-269).
Interestingly, one of the bitterest disputes between the SACP and the EFF revolves precisely around the question of who has access to the patronage networks of the ANC government. Was it Julius Malema in his previous incarnation as the leader of the ANC youth league? Or is it now the leaders of the SACP who head the national department of public work, the Eastern Cape province, other Ministries and national departments and other provincial legilstures and provincial departments, as well as municipalities across the length and breadth of South Africa? How does this reality of state power – what the SACP’s former chairman and the current secretary general of the ANC, Gwede Mantashe, once called ‘the sins of incumbency’ – affect the SACP’s ideological posture, given what the the Marxist theoretician Milovan Djilas wrote about the rise and hegemony of “The New Class” in former Soviet states, which bureaucratic “New Class” was made up of Communists deployed in the state, and who did not own, but “controlled”, through entry-ism, access to enormous resources at the disposal of the Communist-dominated states?
Have Jeremy Cronin and the SACP interrogated the worrying potential and immense possibilities that the black economic empowerment (BEE) rent-seeking economy, as well as the SACP’s close proximity to, if not embeddedness in, the ANC’s patronage and tendepreneurial networks across the country have spurned, out of the SACP member-deployees in the South African democratic State, an autonomous, powerful, power-hungry and unaccountable new social formation – a new bureaucratic, lupine, parasitic class – such as Milovan Djilas’ bureaucratic “‘New Class”? What measures has the SACP put in place to forestall and guard against the emergence and consolidation of such a predatory and avaricious South African Communist Party-originated “compradore”, parasitic and lupine bureaucratic “New Class” within the South African State, which may seek to organize and constitute itself as a “Communist quasi-State within a democratic South African State”?
The SACP and COSATU openly and warmly welcomed the Zuma national government’s decision to place five Limpopo provincial departments under administration and to send a Treasury-led national task force there, as this was, allegedly, linked with factional fights within the ruling ANC and a way to politically get to Malema. The two fraternal organisations were similarly very supportive of calls for the so-called ‘Lifestyle Audit’ to be done on Julius Malema, when he was still the ANCY youth league’s leader. No other ANC, SACP, COSATU and ANC Youth league leader has since been publicly subjected to such a ‘Lifestyle Audit’ call, despite many instances of unaccounted for instant accumulation of opulence being reported about in our media. This reveals the tactical opportunism and politicization of the laudable fight against corruption in our country.
Who is a “patron” (to borrow Fay Chung’s term)? And who is a “tenderpreneur” (to borrow a term that the SACP leaders almost single-handedly invented for our political partois speech)?
In his excellent essay quoted above, Pallo Jordan correctly stated that:
“Historical materialism teaches that the basis of class lies in the social productive relations, and not in the real or apparent relative affluence of individuals”.
Has the emergent and growing collaborative relationship between the tenderpreneurs and the parasitic, lupine State bureaucracy’s “New Class” created new threats to our further democratic advances? Is this the social productive relation on the basis of which the SACP has defined and determined the EFF as being “neo-fascist”? Or what is actually the class and dialectical materialist basis of such a characterization by the SACP of the EFF and Julius Malema as “neo-fascist”?
In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels stated:
“In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter its degree of development at the time”.
Jeremy Cronin and the SACP need to explain why they condemn the EFF which, to quote the Communist Manifesto, “bring to the front, as a leading question…the property question…” And Cronin and the SACP need to urgently expatiate on what precisely is the class basis of the politics and behavior of the EFF and Malema, far beyond the myopia-endowed #”tenderpreneurship” Twitter hashtag. In that way, they will assist South Africa to uncover and see what really “lies hidden” from our public’s view by the EFF’s red overalls, gumboots, Makarapas and domestic maid attire “striptease” appearances.
(See my own understanding of what Fascism, according to the Communist International [Comintern]’s leader and one of history’s greatest anti-Fascist fighters and theoreticians, Georgi Dmitrov of Bulgaria, is and means in my Politicsweb article of 17 September 2012 under the heading “Malema the ‘Fascist’: A comment”).
Since the EFF is, to again quote the Communist Manifesto, “against the existing social and political order of things”, Jeremy Cronin need to clarify why they do not regard the EFF as a “revolutionary movement” (Communist Manifesto), but as a counter-revolutionary, neo-fascist outfit. How do Jeremy Cronin and the SACP arrive at this definition, which was deployed on Julius Malema and the ANC youth league at the time, long before the EFF, the EFF’s red overalls and maid dresses and hard miners’ hats (Makarapas)? In actuality, these imprecations were hurled at Malema long before what NEHAWU describes as the “striptease” of the “EFF fascists”.
To hear Jeremy Cronin tell it, you would be made to believe that the horror of Fascism started only when “a dozen Nazi MPs” in Germany’s Weimar republican parliament caught the rest of the other overwhelmingly majoritarian parliamentary factions “flat-footed”, as he put it in his piece.
This piece of subjectivised, mechanically transposed German history in 1928 is cut and pasted to exactly fit with Cronin’s overall “majoritarian” ideological offensive against Julius Malema and the EFF. Of course the EFF has a very short history of less than three years. But with regard to the history of German Fascism, we would need to start not at the point when “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928” intimidated the supine and prostrate and weakling Weimar Republic caught “flat-footed”. We would need to go back a decade at least, at the end of the First World War and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Nigh, we will need to in fact go much further back to how the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck used militarism, stunning military conquests and the German martial traditions to smash France in 1871 on his military victory sprint to create the first, powerful united Germany in history.
[The birth of South Africa’s negotiated settlement, after protracted multi-party negotiations at CODESA, which were preceded by “civil war and social division”, could not be further from how Otto von Bismarck forged a united Germany on the military defeat of Austria and France. Whatever the negative effects and consequences of South Africa’s “civil war and social divisions”, they can never compare to the utter, nihilistic destruction of the First World War on European countries, including Germany].
Suffice to quote here what Paul Kennedy in ‘The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers’ wrote about the specific period just prior to the appearance in Germany’s Weimar parliament of “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928′:
He wrote that:
“Even before the First World War, political groups across Europe had been criticizing the arcane, secretive methods and elitist preconceptions of the ‘old diplomacy’, and calling instead for a reformed system, where the affairs of state were open to the scrutiny of the people and their representatives” (Vintage Books, 1989, page 284).
Kennedy further wrote that:
“But the problem with ‘public opinion’ after 1919 was that many sections of it did not match that fond Gladstonian and Wilsonian vision of a liberal, educated, fair-minded populace, imbued with internationalist ideas, utilitarian assumptions, and respect for the rule of law”. (Ibid).
And lastly, Kennedy wrote:
“To hundreds of thousands of former Frontsoldaten across the continent of Europe, disillusioned by the unemployment and inflation and boredom of the postwar bourgeois-dominated order , the conflict had represented something searing but positive: martial values, the camaraderie of warriors, the thrill of violence and action. To such groups, especially in the defeated nations of Germany and Hungary and in the bitterly dissatisfied victor nation of Italy, but also among the French right, the ideas of the new fascist movements – of order, discipline, and national glory, of the smashing of the Jews, Bolsheviks, intellectual decadents, and self-satisfied liberal middle class – had great appeal. In their eyes (and in the eyes of their equivalents in Japan), it was struggle and force and heroism which were the enduring features of life, and the tenets of Wilsonian internationalism which were false and outdated”. (Ibid, page 285).
[In contrast, in the case of post-apartheid South Africa, there is a very broad, overwhelming public support for the values, principles and the liberal, democratic political freedoms and liberties provided for in our 1996 Constitution, including in our Bill of Rights. Julius Malema is today a politician and public figure thanks to the freedoms of speech, expression and association provided for by the 1996 Constitution. Equally, the EFF’s parliamentary contingent owes its existence to elections guaranteed by our Constitution. So, a “neo-fascist” streak in the EFF and Malema, unlike with regard to “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928”, would have no basis whatsoever in political heuristics and the socio-economic milieu of post-apartheid South Africa. Even the extant and horrible apartheid-inherited inequalities in our country, including economic inequalities, would never justify either a “neo-fascist”, or a Zimbabwe-style political and strategic response from the EFF and Julius Malema.]
Jeremy Cronin is correct in his article to remind himself and us of Karl Marx’s maxim about history repeating itself first as a tragedy, and secondly, as a farce, which regressive evolutionary idea Marx borrowed, holus-bolus, from Hegel. Cronin was right to so remind himself because any reading of how Paul Kennedy described the European scene prior to “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928” catching the Weimar parliament “flat-footed” would affirm to him that any comparison between Julius Malema and the EFF with “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928” is misleading, false, distorted, unhelpful and mischievous in the extreme, although it may be theatrically entertaining.
The crux of the issue is that the Weimar republican politicians during the war interlude at the turn of the 20th century were almost as equally to blame for the rise, growth and ultimate triumph of Hitler’s Nazis as the European fascist, genocidal politicians were.
This should really be the take-away lesson from this sordid and tragic European history for the SACP and the ANC. Even if Malema and the EFF wish to emulate Hitler and Mussolini, they will only succeed on the basis of the utter and complete failure of our current constitutional and democratic dispensation to fulfill its promises and constitutional mandate, just as Germany’s Weimar republican politicans were such tremendous failures.
Even in the worst case future scenario of South Africa’s unimaginable future collapse on the level of Weimar parliament’s collapse, it is hard to see and imagine how there can be any “bitter spot” confluence of myriad of such tremendously negative factors – or the eruption of an absolutely perfect economic, political, democratic and constitutional storm – to make Malema or EFF’s Fascism ever possible, let alone unavoidable and victorious, in South Africa. After all, we do not need the bogeymen of European Fascists like Hitler and Mussolini to scare us into vigilance or frighten us with dramatic evocations of German Fascism’s boots, hats, salutes and beer-fuelled “Hail Hitler” shouts in a rickety, jerry-can, socially discredited and politically cowed as well as cowered Weimar parliament in 1928.
We have our own home-grown, “local is nie lekker nie” white Fascism’s bogeyman to nightly remind and frighten us enough about the destructive outcome of the genocidal ideologies of Hitler’s latter-day disciples, black or white!
And the key point is precisely that our own home-grown, “local is nie lekker nie” white Fascism did not announce its arrival using the theatrics and the tragicomedy akin to “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928”. These vilest white Fascists here at home under Apartheid gave the pretense of respecting the white racist parliament, correctly played by the parliamentary rules, correctly rose up on a parliamentary point of order or a point of privilege, wore designer suits, bespoke shoes and spoke the polished and velvet parliamentary language to rival the one used in the British parliament. They did not disrupt a single parliamentary session, not did they conspire to “collapse” the white racist parliament. They in fact elaborately hid their true fascist intents behind perfect bourgeois political and parliamentary mannerisms.
Mr. Jeremy Cronin, for God’s sake, these local white Fascists under Apartheid even permitted the courageous lone opposition voice of the Progressive Federal Party (PFP)’s Helen Suzman, and treated her with utmost respect, proper parliamentary decorum and bowed to parliament’s presiding officer before leaving the parliamentary floor.
But this did not mean they were lesser Fascists nevertheless.
That is why Pallo Jordan was so correct in advising us that the thing that distinguished Marxists from other political formations is that they uncover what lies hidden behind appearances. They are not deceived, nor taken in by forms. They search for what lies behind forms – they look for the content and the real meaning of things.
We had our own white Fascist in PW Botha not a long time ago, as the UK Robin Renwick’s book has just reminded us all. Our memories of PW Botha’s fascist rule are still very fresh. And none of us with a sane political mind would want to subject our people and country again to the heartless, brutal, murderous and “the white season” of the 1980s decade – of death squads, military occupations of our townships, of unending assassinations, of invasions of our neighbouring countries, of extreme civil and domestic strife, of States of Emergency, of acute economic near-collapse, of our sons and daughters fleeing to neighboring and far-flung countries to seek political refuge, of our political leaders being incarcerated for decades in our notorious prisons, and of mutinies and popular insurrections in our townships and dorpies and villages.
Those who would attempt such a fascist scenario for our future would be smashed and defeated, even before they finish they own first Night of Broken Glasses or their own Night of Long Knives.
If this is by any chance the “neo-fascist” future scenario Malema and the EFF are planning for our country, they will be destroyed and paraded at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Jeremy Cronin seems bent to scare himself to death with visions of South Africa’s “neo-fascist” future, courtesy of Julius Malema and the EFF. In point of fact, there is a much greater danger of “neo-fascism” erupting as a fellow companion of the vile, sporadic and violent xenophobic attacks that are quickly developing, sadly, as a hallmark of our black townships and black areas. Therein lies the danger of disgruntled black petty bourgeois Fascism, something Cronin should pay greater attention to.
Fascism has the same snowball-chance-in-hell prospect in the future of democratic South Africa as indeed Communism has! Meaning almost zilch such future prospect. Jeremy Cronin, as a Communist leader, should know this political truism better than most of us.
And Cronin may just want to tell us what is the organic difference between the open white Fascism of Eugene Terreblanche’s AWB and its current followers, who flout Swastikas-adorned flags, do “Hail Hitler” salutes, wear brown shirts and brown boots adorned with Swastikas and the faces of Adolf Hitler, which invaded and “collapsed” the CODESA talks in Kempton Park for a day, which maims and kills innocent blacks, which spreads their hate ideology and memorialises Hitler’s Nazis, on the one hand, and what he, the SACP and NEHAWU allege is the “neo-fascist” agenda of Julius Malema and the EFF, who have co-opted the ANC’s Freedom Charter. How come an openly white Fascist and racist grouping like the AWB can be said to be in the same camp – “the fascist territory” – as a “revolutionary movement”, the majority of whose members came from the ANC, a political party that self-defines as a “Marxist-Leninist-Fanonist” formation, I mean the EFF?
It is true, however, that almost every political parry or government has its moment of fascist madness. That is altogether a different, albeit still very serious, matter.
The ANC revealed its fascist madness through the Marikana massacre and its torture camps in Angola during the exile years. The USA revealed its fascist madness in Vietnam. France did so in Algeria. The USA and Britain revealed their fascist madness through their rogue regime changes in Iraq and Libya. Angela Merkel’s Germany has just revealed its fascist madness through its foolish and disastrous support of the fascist government of president Petro Poroschenko in (western) Ukraine, and its self-destructive attitude towards eastern Ukraine, Russia and president Vladimir Putin. The USSR revealed its own fascist madness by invading its eastern European client states and Afghanistan. Israel is revealing its fascist madness by continuing to occupy Palestine and by waging wars against the tiny Gaza Strip. Irag’s Saddan Hussein revealed his fascist madness by invading Iran and Kuwait. China revealed its fascist madness by invading, unprovoked, India and Vietnam respectively. Belgium had its fascist madness in the Congo through King Leopold. Japan revealed its fascist madness through its brutal colonial occupation of China and Korea. Australia revealed its fascists madness in its extermination of the Aboriginals and their continuing neglect and marginalization. Uganda revealed its fascist madness through Idi Amin, and the Central African Republic is currently putting its fascist madness on display and previously through Emperor Bokassa, etc, etc.
But all these incidents do not come near to being even close to the whole enchilada, unbridled, full-blown and full form Fascism of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis in 1928 and subsequently, until the Fall of the Third Reich in 1945.
What today comes the closest to a full-blown Fascism, in the classical sense that the Comintern’s Georgi Dmitrov defined it, is really the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), or the so-called the Islamic Caliphate of Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi cutting across Iraq and Syria.
It is very possible that once in power, like the ANC has already done, the EFF will also reveal its own fascist madness episodically, just like president Robert Mugabe did in Matabeleland in 1982 and has been episodically doing since 2002.
But Fascism as such in future South Africa? So unlikely it is definitely most improbable.
So Jeremy Cronin, being a world-renown poet himself, was, I suspect, taking poetic license and liberties with the dramatic expression about “a dozen Nazi MPs in Weimar parliament in 1928”, and his “From Nazis to Malema” sub-title of his article. He most probably was trying to forestall, through scaremongering, the possible electoral growth of the EFF in future elections.
One of the key blind spots in Jeremy Cronin’s turbulent relationship with the EFF is his hardline, doctrinaire, undifferentiated and totally dismissive political attitude towards the EFF, and towards Julius Malema especially, as if neither has any self-redeeming political quality to them.
Yet Cronin, in his 06 April 2011 Umsebenzi article, wrote that “we need popular power to counter and transform other key nodes of power, not least big corporate (including media) capital”. As to why Cronin refuses to view and regard and to include the EFF as part of “popular power” which he envisages, and, as he says, is needed “to counter and transform”, as he put it, “corporate [including media] capital”, is not explained.
This dismissive attitude of Jeremy Cronin towards the EFF and Julius Malema, including his readiness to even cut and paste the tragedies of Germany’s Fascism history in order to scaremonger, reminds one of what Franz Fanon wrote about cognitive dissonance:
“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable called cognitive dissonance. And because it is important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief”.
Cronin seems determined to allow the reality of the emergence of Malema’s EFF as the third biggest electoral and democratic force in our fifth parliament not to alter his ‘core belief’, as Franz Fanon would put it. He would rather rationalize through ‘a revolutionary phrase’, to ignore and to deny the evidence about the surprising, relatively good EFF electoral performance in our last national elections. He clearly reckons that the relative success of the EFF portends a deeply worrying semiotics about the possible dire future of the SACP as a viable force of the Left.
Jeremy Cronin seems to be succumbing to “cognitive dissonance” (Franz Fanon) when it comes to Julius Malema and the EFF, I am afraid to say.
I believe that Cronin can surely do better than that.
Not so, Jeremy?
CONCLUSION: WHERE TO THE SACP’S MANDARINS ON THE “NEO-FASCIST” MALEMA AND THE EFF?
One of the occasions in which Jeremy Cronin unleashed his very considerable and highly impressive theoretical capability and strategic mind was during his interview with Howard Barrell in Lusaka, Zambia, on 16 July 1989, during the ANC and SACP’s exile years.
Relevant to our discussion of the ill-tempered and acrimonious Cronin-Malema political and personal dynamic is how, in that interview with Howard Barrell, Cronin tackled, at some length, the vexatious political issues of the ANC’s “vanguardism” and “hegemony” and “strategic leadership” of the liberation struggle at the time. Sometimes I wonder if it is not Jeremy Cronin’s own specific, and possibly outdated, understanding of these very important revolutionary concepts in the Marxist lexicon – the concepts of “vanguardism”, “hegemony” and “strategic leadership” -, as he expounded to Howard Barrell more than a quarter of a century ago in Lusaka, which hold him back from exploring a different relation paradigm towards the EFF and Julius Malema. I am often minded that it is these very crucial concepts which go to the very heart of why the SACP and its leaders have adopted such a confrontational, nihilistic, if not totalitarian political posture towards the EFF and Julius Malema. (See O’Malley Archives, Cronin, Jeremy, [First Interview] with Howard Barrell, 16 July 1989, Lusaka). It does often seem that what the SACP, Cronin and other South African Communist leaders seek to achieve, in relation to the EFF and Julius Malema, is to firstly deligitimise them as effective and meaningful political factors in our “democratic, multi-party space”, as Cronin put it in his article on “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928”, and to ultimately render them politically unthreatening and harmless, say the way COPE now is to the ANC, or the way the PAC has for so long been to the ANC and the SACP.
It must be upfront conceded that the way the SACP and ANC leaders dealt with the youth insurrection of Julius Malema’s ANC youth league, until the expulsion of Malema from the ANC, was a master stroke. The SACP played a pivotal role in the neutering of Malema’s youth revolt within the ANC through the relaunching of the Young Communist League in December 2003. That the ANC youth league of today is very much a shadow of its former, glorious “king-maker” self, is evidence of the great success of the SACP strategy to neutralize what was an emerging anti-communist militancy within Thabo Mbeki-era ANC youth league.
It is also clear that the SACP has not yet really developed and designed a correct and effective strategic and tactical response to Malema’s incendiary, insurrectionary youth politics since he was expelled from the ANC. What SACP’s Blade Nzimande referred in November 2014 as “toxic reality” of the growing collaboration between “DA brat pack” and Malema’s “neo-fascists”, as well as president Zuma’s parliamentary compliment to Malema in his Response to 2015 SONA, is indicative of the limitations of the SACP’s strategy of “Nazifiction” of the EFF and Julius Malema through smear, innuendoes and outright gossiping.
But the thing that bitterly taunts Cronin, the SACP and the ANC is that Malema was not politically finished by his roughly-handled expulsion from the ANC by the ANC disciplinary appeal committee led by the current ANC and South African deputy president and the darling and the ultimate poster-boy of our country’s neoliberal crowd, Cyril Ramaphosa. If anything, Malema continues to give his former fellow ANC comrades good grief. It is conceivable that one day in the misty future South Africa will thank Malema and his EFF for proving the ANC’s canard that “it is cold outside the ANC” to have been untruthful.
The SACP needs to come up with a better long term strategy and short-term tactics than just calling the EFF and Malema as “neo-fascist”. And the sooner it does that, the better.
And here is why the EFF’s 25-member parliamentary contingent is such an immanent, imminent, direct and existential threat to the SACP.
No, not because the EFF MPs behave like, and are reminiscent of, “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928”.
There is a much more prosaic and less florid explanation to the apoplexy of the SACP, and Cronin in particular, in relation to the EFF’s parliamentary contingent:
Just prior to president Jacob Zuma rising to deliver his Response to 2015 SONA, one of the MPs in our National Assembly rose on a point of order to ask if it was parliamentary for Blade Nzimande, ANC MP, to wear an SACP insignia in parliament. Seen from my TV viewer’s point, it seemed that Nzimande had put on a red SACP logo pin on the front upper pocket of his dark suit jacket.
Nzimande then stood up to offer clarification. And it is his answer that I believe largely explains the SACP’s huge, unprecedented ideological and political offensive against the EFF, its relatively puny parliamentary contigent, and specifically Julius Malema.
In brief, Nzimande explained that he did not break any parliamentary rule by spotting his party’s logo, because he was spotting a logo of a party (the SACP) which was not represented in our parliament. The presiding offer concurred with him and his explanation was sustained and carried the day. Nzimande was allowed to continue to spot his party logo on his jacket, which party is not represented in parliament, because it has never won a single democratic vote in any election on any level since 1994. This is so because the SACP has never contested elections during the entire lifespan of South Africa’s democracy.
In his official statement on the occasion of his announcement of the dramatic changes twenty five years ago that permanently changed the face of South Africa, former apartheid president FW de Klerk harshly criticized the fact that, although the SACP has not contested any election and has not won a single vote, it has a preponderant influence on the ANC and on our National Democratic Revolution (NDR).
Yet not far from Nzimande was the EFF’s 25-member parliamentary contingent milking the national publicity afforded to it by the TV broadcasts of parliamentary proceedings to the last drop. Even more than that, the EFF’s mere red, shouting attire, in a sartorial taunt of the SACP’s Red October red attire, announces it to millions and millions of TV viewers and radio listeners and social media pundits,who now tune in the Parliament Channel on TV in unprecedented numbers since the EFF’s advent in parliament.
The EFF’s so-called “Marxist-Leninist-Fanonist” radical youth revolution is being televised, broadcasted on radio and evangelized across new social media platforms since their relatively good showing in our last national elections, thanks to their red-attired parliamentary contingent!
Contrast this good parliamentary fortunes of the EFF with the fact that the attires of the other parties represented in parliament make them all indistinguishable from one other at a passing glance on TV. The EFF’s attire stands out and cries “It’s us here the EFF; Pay back the money!”. On the other hand, the SACP is not represented, and is nowhere in parliament to milk the free, national publicity of what has become our politics’ biggest national stage, until the next local elections next year – our national parliament.
In the interregnum between elections, the EFF is the publicity king over the SACP, except for a tiny, invisible pin on the jacket of Blade Nzimande in parliament, who still has to first justify why he wears a logo of a party unrepresented in parliament.
Even when the SACP members take to the parliamentary floor to speak or make a point of order or privilege, they do not rise as SACP MPs, as the “dozen Nazi MPs in 928”, or as the EFF’s parliamentary contingent in our fifth national parliament, routinely did and do. Presdient Zuma does not even compliment the SACP as he did the EFF’s Julius Malema.
No wonder one thinks that the SACP members who are MPs on the ANC ticket must be feeling surly, churlish and very chaffed at the huge free publicity exposure its nemesis, the EFF and its policies, are getting. In practice, the EFF is ascending in the popular imagination, thanks to their presence in the fifth parliament and what the ANC and the SACP call the EFF’s “publicity stunts”, or NEHAWU describes as “striptease”. Their parliamentary presence has turned the Parliament Channel on TV into very, very popular slot competing with our country’s most watched soapies
Whilst this unprecedented public interest in and fascination with the going-ons in our parliament must be good for our democracy, it is not that clear that the SACP is reaping collateral benefits from such public excitement about our parliament. As the EFF is ascending in the public imagination, it is eclipsing the SACP’s public profile as the latter struggles for undivided voter and viewer attention.
The SACP does not have to break its long-standing, historic alliance with the ANC, nor does it have to hasten the collapse of the Tripartite Alliance, to address this strategic, existential threat to itself. It just has to acknowledge that more – much more – needs to be done by itself to strategically respond to the emergence and rise of the EFF and Malema as a formidable national political factor.
I would suggest that one of such responses by the SACP should be that it is allowed by the ANC in the future to contest municipal, provincial and national elections in its own right, even if it ends up with only one or two or a handful of MPs in our national parliament initially.
But that will at least give the SACP a parliamentary and legislative platform to give voice to its communist convictions and policies.
The SACP leadership should also remember what Zimbabwe’s former Education Minister, the Chinese-Zimbabwean, Fay Chung wrote about in relation to the Zimbabwean masses and ZANU-PF’s post-1976 “ill-defined” Marxist rhetoric:
“The poor regarded socialism, however ill-defined, as representing their interests.” (Ibid).
And this too is key to the SACP’s understanding of the powerful influence and the attractiveness of the rhetoric of Julius Malema and his EFF exercise over our black petty bourgeois and poor and unemployed masses.
South Africa’s Communists, especially our committed white communists like Jeremy Cronin, may want to academically and theoretically argue, as well as expatiate endlessly, until they are blue in the face, on whether Malema and his EFF’s “Marxist-Leninist-Fanonist” socialism is “scientific” or “toxic” or “neo-fascist” or “striptease”. But our indigent, unemployed and petty bourgeois masses will go with and vote the socialism and “Marxism-Leninism” that are beamed to them in their living rooms from our national parliament through the statements of the EFF’s 25-strong, boisterous and clearly attention-seeking parliamentary contingent, and not the stodgy, unexciting, old-age, pontificating, snooty, Croninistically curmudgeonly and rules-based “scientific socialism” of the SACP’s backroom Central Committee, Politbureau and SACP conferences, which are never broadcasted to the masses directly, and which in any case are wrapped in arcane and difficult-to-access deep academic jargon favored by Jeremy Cronin.
Jeremy Cronin can compare the EFF to “a dozen Nazi MPs in 1928” as much and as long as he wants, but what our masses hear through the Parliament Channel is that Malema and the EFF give them hope and are fighting in their corner, whilst they do not hear the Communist voices booming from our parliament and provincial legislatures.
It is highly grotesque, and in a sense politically tragic, given the glorious struggle history and credentials of South African Communists (SACP), that much younger parties like the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), DA, African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), United Democratic Movement (UDM), Freedom Front Plus (FF+), COPE, EFF and others, with hardly any comparable struggle background and history, can be represented and heard in our elected national parliament and provincial legislatures, even if through the mouth of a single MP, whilst the singular, vanguard and vibrant voice of South Africa’s Communism is stilled by its alliance with the ANC and COSATU.
It cannot be true that in its ideological analysis and understanding of the current juncture of South Africa’s evolving political and power dynamics, the SACP is convinced that its primary focus must be to launch a sustained ideological, majoritarian offensive against the EFF and Julius Malema, because the EFF as “neo-fascist” has become what Blade Nzimande once described as “a threat to our democratic advances”.
This ill-thought approach reduces the SACP to the low level of the EFF, or rather elevates the EFF to the lofty level of the SACP. It also makes the SACP to come across as petty-minded, unimaginative and stirred, if not shaken.
Whatever its appearances and rhetoric, whatever its current political posture and fashionability, whatever its parliamentary behavior and its radical politics, the EFF is a small fish in a small pond, with only 6% representation in parliament. There are much bigger fish swimming in the sea, like the DA, with which the SACP has to contend. The EFF is a lizard in a river brimming with crocodiles.
But if you hear the SACP obsess about the EFF and Julius Malema, you would be forgiven for thinking that the EFF won close to 40% of the vote in last year’s national election. In fact, thanks to the SACP’s unrelenting, majoritarian attacks on the EFF, the latter probably enjoys about 40% of popular imagination today.
The foremost, the primary and the biggest threat facing the SACP are the growing and intense internal contradictions and contestations within COSATU and the ANC which are rending both apart. The SACP leaders must display what Nicos Poulantzas, in the classic ‘Fascism and Dictatorship’ termed ‘pertinent effects’, which gives arise to social formation at a political and ideological level, in their strategic and tactical response to the emergence and rise of the EFF and the unique political personality of Julus Malema.
The expulsion of Julius Malema from the ANC has not resolved the ANC’s acute and fast ripening internal contradictions and contestations. It is true that the EFF’s mode of political operation may be exacerbating, but is certainly not causing, some of the ANC’s own internal contradictions and contestations.
For the SACP to misread this EFF dynamic is to play into the hands of Julius Malema.
Even if Jeremy Cronin and the other SACP leaders succeed to vanquish, tame, domesticate and slay what they view as the “neo-fascist” dragon monster represented by the EFF and Julius Malema, they will not have resolved a single of the acute and deepening internal contradictions and contestations eating away at the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance’s own strategic core and the center of its gravitational pull.
Only when the South African Communist voice, as embodied by the SACP, begins to contest our democratic elections at all levels of elected power and to again boom across the length and breadth of our country; only when South African Communism, as represented by the SACP, has the courage and conviction to stop hiding behind the ANC and to represent itself in our national parliament; only when the masses of South Africa’s people begin to hear the voice(s) of the SACP’s elected representatives who would have emerged from under the ANC’s anorak; and only if the SACP finally stands on its own feet, in its own right, will the SACP begin to have a modicum of a chance to politically out-compete and defeat what it sees as the theatrical Fascism of the EFF and Julius Malema.
After all, the fate and unity of both the ANC and COSATU no more depend on the SACP alone. Other internal Tripartite Alliance forces, and other forces external to the Tripartite Alliance, may break the Alliance, as is happening with COSATU, and thus expose the SACP to the harsh and unforgiving headwinds of our politics. And then the SACP’s detractors will proclaim: Slovo said Socialism has not failed, but we say the SACP has failed!
To fight a fight, your own head must be in the ring to take the other fighter’s punches and blows. No good fight is ever fought behind someone else’s mask. To truly and thoroughly enjoy your favorite tune, you must be ready to go out and sing it in the rain, and not expect to come in the house dry, because you spent the whole time in the rain ducking and diving in order to eschew being hit by the torrent of rain drops falling from the sky.
For how long can the ANC be the SACP’s umbrella? Especially in our stormy, turbulent political times? For how long?
The SACP must take off the ANC mask from its face and start to contest power in its own right. Otherwise it may soon find out that with its unbendable commitment to neoliberalism of the NDP, the ANC has flown too close to the Sun, and its wings will be melting during the next municipal and two national elections.
The SACP must start now to put on, flap about and use its own wings to fly solo in all the “democratic, multi-party spaces” we wrestled through “civil war and social divisions”.
Some of us may even be interested in and attracted to such an independent SACP.
In his interview with Howard Barrell in Lusaka in 1989, the ANC and SACP’s then youngish white revolutionary, Jeremy Cronin, revealing flourishes of strategic brilliance and great intellectual promise as well as strategic leadership nous, said the following about the ANC’s leadership of the then raging anti-apartheid national liberation struggle, strongly emphasising that he believed that the ANC leadership:
“…are very mature and deep and have a very excellent, I would say, revolutionary grasp. It’s not only a mature leadership, but it really is an extremely mature, deep leadership, I would say, in that sense that’s been very important, and possibly the most important feature: that it has been quite strategic in broad terms and has been able to sort of ride a complex situation that has unfolded…again I think the movement is exhibiting considerable maturity and a combination of revolutionary principle and tactical flexibility, so I think it gets that right. So it is able to offer broad leadership extremely well, I think”.
Why then is the SACP of today, co-led by Jeremy Cronin, and operating in a constitutional democracy, cornering itself into this tiny rat corner, where it furiously boxes with and flails at the mobile “neo-fascist” shadows of the EFF and Julius Malema? Why has the SACP of a much more mature Jeremy Cronin abandoned its previously-admired ability to display and deploy “…a combination of revolutionary principle and tactical flexibility”? Why is the SACP so obdurate, dogmatic and doctrinaire in how it relates to the EFF, even much more than the DA of Helen Zille? Have the SACP’s frustration with, anger at and one-dimensional opinion of the EFF and Malema completely clouded its assessment of the latter two?
Given the highly complex and unprecedented political situation unfolding today before the SACP, exacerbated by the emergence and rise of Malema’s EFF, the SACP leaders like Cronin should rise to the occasion in ways and manner Cronin so well observed, studied and captured in the exiled ANC leadership in his interview with Howard Barrell in Lusaka in 1989.
If the current SACP leadership cohort does that in the current juncture of South Africa’s democratic development, especially with regard to the EFF and Julius Malema, future generations of young South Africans may one day in the future use the same pathos and breathless language akin to the ones Cronin employed to describe the exiled ANC leadership’s astonishing strategic depth, tactical brilliance and unbending commitment to the core liberation principles which underpinned its anti-apartheid freedom struggle.
If Cronin convinces the SACP leaders and himself to emulate the deep ANC strategic leadership lesson he noted back in 1989, then we would truly not have to be bothered for a second by the dark and overly pessimistic mutterings of Robin Renwick, the UK’s former ambassador to South Africa, about post-Nelson Mandela South Africa and the quality of the current ANC leadership cohort, as reported by Andrew Donaldson’s Politicsweb article quoted at the beginning of this article.
Nor would Jeremy Cronin’s perceived abuse of the scarecrow of Julius Malema’s “a dozen Nazis in 1928” ever come to pass in the future democratic South Africa.
Because the truth is that only a powerful, rejuvenated, strategic, broad-minded, ever growing and an independent South African Communist Party (SACP), which is not driven by petty-mindedness, is not paranoid, is not parochial, and is not strategically and politically inept, is our best, first and last guarantee against any future emergence and triumph of Fascism and bourgeois as well as religious fanatical totalitarianism – (whether black or white) – in South Africa, including even the SACP- and NEHAWU-alleged “striptease” neo-Fascism of Julius Malema and the EFF.
It was why the white Fascists of Apartheid made their first opening, strategic, massive, critical and devastating repressive and undemocratic move against the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) of Moses Kotane, Yusuf Dadoo, JB Marks and Ruth First, the predecessor of the SACP, when they launched their all-out fascist war offensive in 1950, two years after seizing power, against our country’s freedom, liberation and democratic forces.
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19th Cedia blog
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
28 February 2015
Written by:
Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)
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