When triumphalism trumps thought: A response to Floyd Shivambu

After the debauchery of the festive season, I read Floyd Shivambu's blog on the 1st National Assembly with indifference owing to January worries and other issues. Upon my first reading, what struck me about it was its triumphalist, rhetorical tone, but I choose to not dwell on that. What disturbed me the most was the lazy minded way in which he dealt with theoretical issues. For instance on point (a) as he explains the EFF's ideological posture he sleeps on the wheel and regurgitates the Congress position on South Africa's social formations: which is a mutation of the apartheid project of dividing our people along these lines: Whites, Coloureds, Indians and Blacks i.e Zulu, Xhosa, Pedi etc. This sees him erroneously celebrating the election of so called Coloured and Indian fighters in the CCT, apparently this proves the non-racial nature of the EFF. Anyone who has seriously wrestled with the black consciousness philosophy appreciates that Coloureds and Indians share the same mark of apartheid dehumanisation, so they are included in the Blacks rubric. This explains why Biko and his comrades created an inclusive political identity to mitigate exactly what Shivambu is celebrating. So, the question arises: Commissar Shivambu, why are you celebrating the election of these fighters? Are they not black like all the other blacks elected at CCT level?

The opposite side of this problem is his investment in the non-racialism red herring. The fight was never the fight for a non racialist society, only Whites and their SACP lackeys were obsessed with non-racialism. The fight has always been one against White racism to create a non-racist society. Perhaps I need to explain this further. Racialism is about positively identifying with ones racial grouping: there's nothing sinister there, unless you have uncritically absorbed the poorly conceived congress position on this issue. Non-racism is a different story all together, it's about the complete eradication of white supremacy, the source from which white privilege emerges. So I ask again, why elevate the attainment of a non-racialist society without ridding this society of it's inherent racism? Alternatively, can you have non-racialism in a racist society? Or a 'post racial' racist society? I think you can. History has shown that you can have a society wherein racism operates at the level of the unsaid, even though everyone claims to have non-racialist commitments - South Africa is a case in point. This realisation, sadly awakens me to a depressing conclusion: Our Deputy President has not invested the requisite time to understand the differences between racism and racialism, how embarrassing!! Perhaps Andile Mngxitama's Blacks Can't Be Racist would be a useful starting point.

On point (b) Our newly elected Deputy President floating in the air with triumphalism, proceeds and dwarfs the importance of Biko's philosophy, he says "the black consciousness character is one that appreciate while our people where exploited as a class they were also made to believe through various streams of subjugation and ideological work as Africans they are inferior and the struggle for economic freedom seeks to liberate them from their inferiority consciousness which had been inflicted upon black peoples lives over centuries". This is utter distortion of history! The Black Consciousness Movement( BCM) is and has always been clear that black people were subjugated because of their race not because of class. Class was an offshoot of their racial oppression. Frantz Fanon captures this issue very well when he says "in the colonial world the cause is the effect, you are rich because you are white and you are white because you are rich"; the same is true for blacks, we are poor because we are black not because we are unable to sell our labour power. Even when we do we are kept poor intentionally to keep us at the position of blackness, that is, the lowest rung of humanity. This is a race not a class problem. The inferiority complex he glibly runs to was created by slavery and colonialism which had class connotations, not the other way around as he incorrectly intimates. I would humbly, encourage our Deputy President to go and read Biko and Fanon (if he ever did) again to avoid further embarrassing assertions, in the foreseeable future!

Point (d) is the most glaring example of our Deputy President's theoretical cul de sac. In it, Shivambu bleeds his rigid Marxism, he says, whilst chucking history out the window, "the EFF socialist and internationalist character is expressed in the ideological conviction that ours is a class struggle against capitalism and imperialism and should be guided and underpinned by the principles of international socialist solidarity and common struggles of the exploited masses of the world."

The first question is this: is capitalism a raceless endeavour? Or, put in a simpler way is capitalism without a racial character? If it does, why is this crucial aspect not finding expression on this point? Additionally, does this class struggle the EFF is supposedly engaged in not lose the particular or specific nature of the racist oppression that blacks suffer from in a white supremacist world order? Did the workers in Marikana die because they are workers or because they are black? What about Trayvon Martin, a young Black American boy who lived in a neighbourhood deemed a class bracket above basic blackness? Was George Zimmerman, his racist assailant, thinking class or race stereotypes when he stalked and killed him? Also, is it not a known fact that white workers in Australia doing the same work as those in Marikana earn and live in better conditions? How does the cherished class struggle explain this racial discrepancy? Also what in these common struggles makes us think racism gets elided or removed or lessened in its importance as our leader seems to suggest?

This erasure of race points us to an on-going attempt to remove Fanon from the holy triumvirate of Marx-Lenin-Fanon. After this is achieved, we will be left with a hollowed out Fanon, agreeable to a class obsessed, race-erasing movement that will punt socialism at the expense of the race problematic. A disconcerting development, if ever there was one!

I think here we are dealing with the Congress 'broad church mentality' which accommodated everyone at the expense of race as a governing tool of analysis. This flawed analytical frame was at the root of the "different streams with different parties" situation Shivambu seems to bemoan. The PAC radicals of Sobukhwe's generation walked out of the ANC precisely because of this imposition of rigid Marxist ideas to explain racial oppression. Hence, to posit the EFF as being engaged in a class struggle is to be self deceptive and ahistorical. It misses the point intirely, the fight is and has always been against White Supremacy, class has always been a composite element of that fight. The sooner Shivambu gets this there better, for the chances of economic freedom, or we will rue another missed opportunity!