The EFF’s wrecking ball
People must choose: solve problems through democratic dialogue or intolerant violence
Student politics is fractious and complicated by its populist character — whoever steps in front leads the crowd. I came face to face with this reality twice in the past few months: first in a church at a University of the Witwatersrand peace meeting in October and, more recently, at the Higher Education Convention, cohosted by the National Education Crisis Forum.
The peace meeting was disrupted by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). At the convention, 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 organisation and preparation for an inclusive platform for constituency-based policy dialogue were destabilised.
The alternative to dialogue is too ghastly to contemplate: violent student protest and deepening stateled “securitisation” at universities 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. This complicates the dynamics in 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 the party in any social arena.
Deepening crisis through disruption is a political strategy. From Parliament to universities, the EFF’s 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 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 the politics of wrecking everything because collective societal solutions don’t matter. It also means this short-term strategy will, intentionally and unintentionally, unleash forces that will also clash with the EFF down the road. It is breeding 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 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 and 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 unSouth African, as some have suggested, but is also 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 South African Communist Party 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. Liberal scholars usually 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-Semitism.
This is helpful to a degree, but 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.
Today, fascism is mutating and manifesting in a complex matrix of national and global material conditions. It has arrived dressed in pinstriped 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 merely to draw more taut the line between those for democratic transformation and those against?
The EFF is 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. Although 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, decolonising/yet willing to accept support from white capital.
The EFF, like historical fascism, draws its ideas from across the