The global capitalist order is in a state of disarray and panic as the capitalist system comes apart at the seams, and nowhere is this more apparent than in South Africa where “white monopoly capital” and the western imperialist order it so relies on faces an imminent routing
By Ugo Akpan
“The way for the ANC to weaken the EFF? Shut the door and keep Julius Malema out of power” – Daily Maverick
“Why Julius Malema is the mirror image of Donald Trump” – Daily Maverick
“The almost eerie similarities between the playbooks of Julius Malema and Donald Trump” – Daily Maverick
“EFF promotes revenge and hatred and have given their followers a license to hate” – Daily Maverick
“The EFF started with a grudge, presented a promise — then morphed into fascists” – Daily Maverick
“Is Julius Malema the most dangerous man in South Africa?” – The Economist
The above headlines are evidence of the prevalent hysteria emanating from the media apparatus of global capitalism and that crumbling ideology’s branch in South Africa, “White Monopoly Capital.”
South Africa goes to the polls on 29 May, and with only a few days left in the campaign, it is clear that the ruling ANC is unlikely to retain its majority in Parliament and would have to seek a coalition partner to form a government. Given the rift between the insurgent MK, the likely coalition partner is the EFF. The EFF had its increased polling eaten into by the insurgent MK party according to the latest polling survey from Ipsos. Despite the Constitutional Court barring Jacob Zuma from standing for election to Parliament, this is not expected to erode the support for the MK party but is likely to prevent any remote potential for a coalition arrangement with the ruling ANC.
Ipsos, 2024
Ipsos, 2024
Panic within the ranks of the global capitalist order
Tim Cohen of the Daily Maverick aptly sums up the panic in the capitalist bloc, in his article Why Julius Malema is the mirror image of Donald Trump. Tim Cohen rants about the various evils of Malema and Floyd Shivambu, who he asserts Malema has indicated should be made Finance Minister as a condition for an alliance with the ANC.
Cohen then launches into a series of ahistorical and outright nonsensical commentary. He says that “One thing we know about Shivambu’s economics is his decades-long dedication to the idea of nationalisation. This raises the question: why does the EFF cling to the idea of nationalisation despite its absence from the economic agenda of nearly every left-wing organisation worldwide (with the exception of economic basket cases like Venezuela)?”
Cohen’s comment is patently untrue. Nationalisation is high on the agenda of most left-wing parties across the world to the point that it is almost a defining feature of left-wing politics. The Labour Party in Britain under Jeremy Corbyn centred nationalisation of public services including transportation and utilities. Even the current anti-worker center-right Labour Party of Keir Starmer still retains the position that the National Health Service should remain under public control. Under Jeremy Corbyn, the ranks of Labour Party membership swelled to make it the largest party in western Europe. So popular was the Labour Party under Corbyn that it took a coalition of media barons, the Zionist-Israeli lobby, the British national security establishment, and Labour Party insiders at party headquarters to undermine and frustrate the party’s efforts in two general elections in which Labour was poised to take control of Parliament. In France, La France Insoumise commits to “create a public transport and mobility cluster, around the reunited SNCF and 100% public, in order to ensure equal service and access in the territory, refuse to open up to competition for railway lines”, “the development of public transport (metro, bus, tram, cable, etc.) in large towns”, “rejecting the liberalisation of the electricity and gas market: halting the privatisation of hydroelectric dams, preserving the national character of the electricity distribution network”, “ensuring the public management of a list of common goods and essential services established by referendum”, and “prevent private property rights from taking precedence over the protection of water, air, food, life, health and energy”. Left-wing Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), has presided over a spate of nationalisations since taking power in 2018, including the country’s vast lithium industry and the strategic energy industry and power sector. It is obvious that Tim Cohen is uninformed about the political landscape in international left-wing politics. He also ignores the left-wing elephant in the room, the Communist Party of China (CPC), arguably the most important and successful political party in the world today. The CPC administration is a government which the EFF clearly holds in high regard and views as a potential strategic partner should it assume power in South Africa.
Desperate comparisons to Trump and other incoherence
Aside from the gratuitous comparison of Malema to Trump, Cohen’s analysis is obtuse and dreary. He makes an ahistorical claim that “nationalisation was never a part of Marxist thought….” This is outstanding! The Bolshevik Party made nationalisation the front and centre of the Communist Revolution in Russia. If there is any claim to the practical implementation of Marxist thought, it has to be Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. Cohen blatantly misrepresents a quote from Frederick Engels “[T]herein precisely lies the rub; for, so long as the propertied classes remain at the helm, nationalisation never abolishes exploitation but merely changes its form…” as evidence that nationalisation was never part of Marxist thought. This must be either intellectual dishonesty at its worst, or a total inability to comprehend the text of the letter that Engel’s writes to Max Oppenheim. Engels is making the case for a more thorough expropriation and nationalisation than is proposed by Oppenheim in his previous letter. The specific quote referenced by Cohen points out the absurdity of the German and Austrian landowner class (the junkers) expropriating their own class, with respect to worker control of the means of production. Nationalization under Marxism is the expropriation of the propertied class by the working class. Cohen should have been able to reference the seminal quotation of Marxism contained in the seminal work, The Communist Manifesto: “The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” Further works by Marx that should have given Cohen a clue if he was intellectually curious enough to explore Marxist thought before attempting to reference it in his article, is “The Nationalisation of the Land, a paper written by Marx in 1872 which advocates for the policy of nationalisation.
But such is the panic within the ranks of the capitalists and their stenographers that they will grasp at every straw to save the decrepit capitalist order that is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. The EFF is simply in touch with the broad current of the world, and whether or not it clinches power in the upcoming polls, it is positioned to wield increasing influence in South Africa’s changing political economy.