The aesthetic politics of fighting for black economic freedom: between militant socialism, fascism and bling-bling

ABSTRACT

In its nine-year existence, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) consolidated itself as South Africa’s third-largest party, despite continuous, damaging denunciations of some of its key aspects. I argue that a highly aestheticised politics is key to understanding this persistence, necessitating a political-aesthetic reading. I especially focus on the EFF’s adoption of a militarised party aesthetic in its self-stylisation as a contemporary black liberation army, identifying six ways in which it serves to differentiate the party ideologically from its adversaries and manage its organisational challenges. I further examine how the EFF’s highly aestheticised and militarised politics might confirm recurrent criticisms of fascist tendencies. Based on Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of fascism, I consider the functioning of aestheticisation and militarisation as diversions from the EFF’s duplicitous commitment to revolutionary socialism. Being found too limited in engaging the aesthetic as a relatively autonomous dimension of politics, the Benjaminian reading is supplemented with one that takes the EFF leaders’ conspicuous display of material wealth to function as an important, unofficial party aesthetic rooted in black emancipatory politics. The EFF’s political aesthetics is thus conceptualised as a contradictory and perplexing, yet not ineffective mixture of a socialist-revolutionary and bling-bling aesthetic.

KEYWORDS:

• Black liberation
• conspicuous consumption
• Economic Freedom Fighters party
• militarism
• political aesthetics
• South African politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The percentages of the EFF’s results in the national elections were 6,35% in 2014 and 10,79% in 2019.

2. For more general analyses and assessments of the EFF’s impact on South Africa’s parliamentary democracy, see Calland and Seedat (2016), and Yende (2021).

3. For a similar, political-aesthetic analysis of the role of the EFF’s “political style” and performative politics in calling the political establishment and democratic institutions to account for their failure to substantially transform South African society after the end of apartheid, see Mbete (2015).

4. See Mahali (2016) for an in-depth analysis of the EFF’s “subversive appropriation” of the “domestic worker trope.”.

5. Malema was expelled from the ANC in April 2012 for sowing division in the ANC and bringing the party into disrepute. Shivambu was suspended on similar charges (SAPA 2012).

6. For the controversy around the attribution of vanguardism to Lenin, see for example Nash (1990).

7. For an alternative analysis of the EFF’s class allegiances, see Satgar (2019, 592–595).

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Notes on contributors

Matthias Pauwels

Matthias Pauwels is a South Africa-based cultural and political philosopher. He currently researches the entanglement of socially engaged art, popular protest movements and radical decolonial politics in contemporary South Africa. Results have been published in journals such as Cultural Politics, Theoria, De Arte and LitNet Akademies, and in the volume African Somaesthetics: Cultures, Feminisms, Politics.