Eusebius McKaiser crippled analysis

 

 

Eusebius McKaiser, as an individual epitomizes the post-94 “Jack of all trades” mantra; which centers itself, as an ideology, on being good on many fronts. McKaiser is a juggling act aficionado of note: part academic, part social commentator, part author, part radio personality. The problem with this is that you become stretched, such that you never master anything. This often leads to what is called in ghetto football parlance - ‘ukushay’ithembisa’- feigning doing something when you are not. Now ‘ithembisa’ or feigning is synonymous with football; when a player feigns a strike at goal posts to trick defenders to facilitate scoring – Jabu Pule is a feigner of note. So is Eusebius McKasier – unfortunately.

In a poorly written article titled ‘EFFwould be perplexed by power’, McKaiser erroneously accuses the EFF of having a political vision lacking clarity, feasibility, and coherence in its ideology. He fails to follow his own supposed clear argumentation by grounding his take on a misreading of what an anarchist is; this from a supposed serious social commentator is astounding! 

Recently, when Barack Obama was commenting on the racism scandal by the Los Angeles Clippers owner, he intimated as such:

“When folks want to advertise their ignorance we must never stand in their way”.

If you are a serious reader of all revolutions, and the many strands of thought which animated them, you will appreciate that an anarchist is an anti-state ideology which seeks to wilt or destroy the state without even capturing it – a marked difference from the EFF which is a Marxist/Leninist/Fanonian movement. The EFF expresses an unashamed need to capture the state and make it respond to the needs of the majority; a clear distinction if you ‘don’t advertise your ignorance’ for the whole country but actually take time and read its easily available literature.

This first horrible misreading leads McKaiser  to make other embarrassing claims like the analogy of a post revolution moment when EFF is confronted with governing and they suddenly realize they never signed up for such a daunting  task. What this claim suffers from is a glaring failure to characterize the EFF adequately. This is the hallmark of ‘ithembisa’ – you feign thinking and being engaged until your baseless claims become truth, but only to you and your lackeys. Another disconcerting advert for ignorance.

 Let’s allow Mr. McKaiser to speak:

“They are (EFF) anarchists who simply enjoy critiquing life in post-democratic South Africa as horrible for black people and filled with institutions that are inherently anti-black and illegitimate to the core.

That’s the tenor of their criticism of the current government and of their analysis of life in our country in 2014.”

What the EFF wants to do in as far as transforming all anti-black social institutions is to capture them for the sole purpose of what they ought to be utilized for in the first place i.e. being used to lessen the heavy load of poverty, landlessness and nihilism which the ANC government has failed to arrest since it came to power. So why EFF would be hesitant at such a joyful moment beats me.

The Malema and Mngxitama quip on this aspect does not wrestle with a simple fact: radical leaders are multi-faceted and can adapt their politics in many spaces. The assertion that the commander-in-chief Julius Malema and Commissar Mngxitama would be too bored with parliamentary subcommittee meetings is another embarrassing baseless claim. Now it seems we have a pedagogical problem with Mr. McKaiser, which can be exorcised with these rather simplistic lines: Eusebius my brother radicalism doesn’t get washed away by being in an institution you fundamentally dislike or disagree with. Hasn’t the likes of Thomas Sankara, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Morales et al showed us this? What happens is a thorough contestations of ideas in a struggle terrain not of your making to invoke an in vogue Marx adage.

What slowly emerges as one critically analyses this article and many others from the White Left is a lazy minded anti-intellectual rejectionist failure of analysis. Most of these Quaker social commentators often accuse the EFF of demagoguery and anti-intellectualist-rabble-rousing-trite-shouting but they are what they criticize. So essentially McKaiser’s accusation of being ‘perplexed by power’ changes to – and faces him as its inverse opposite – him being ‘perplexed by analysis’. McKaiser clutches at straws instead of reading EFF literature to get its clear, coherent and – I’m quick to add – feasible, vision of a new path that it hopes to walk with societies; provided it gets the mandate after the election on May 7.

The EFF is moving in that direction and no mean spirited lampooning will prevent it from discharging its historical mission.