Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Russian communist coup of October 1917, and Julius Malema, the Commander in Chief of our Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), caught my attention this week for different reasons. Lenin’s last full year of life was in 1923, exactly a hundred years ago; Malema is in our midst right now.
I was reading about Malema’s latest display of outrage against White Monopoly Capital or some sort of evil white racism (maybe the swimming pool incident in Bloemfontein). At the same time, I happened to be reading or re-reading the history of communism in Russia by authors sympathetic and hostile to it, such as Isaac Deutscher, Eric Hobsbawm, Paul Johnson, Alan Bullock and, recently, Stephen Kotkin. From them, I think I have got a pretty clear idea about Lenin. From his own lips, I have got a horribly clear idea about Malema. It might sound silly to compare the cruel, austere, single-minded, original-thinking founder of communism in Russia with our fleshpot clown in red overalls and Gucci accessories, but they also have important similarities, and one is a follower of the other. Both are ardent socialists. Both believe in eradicating private property. Both say they hate capitalism. Both despise the working classes – but they despise them in different ways.
Malema might seem a loud-mouthed buffoon and an outrageous hypocrite, but the fact is that he has founded and led the most successful new party of our democratic age. From nothing, the EFF won 6.4% of the votes in the 2014 general election, and 10.8% in 2019. This is far better than COPE, PAC, ATM or Good, and shows a more rapid advance in popularity than the DA did in the 1990s. The EFF has also been successful in taking over the student bodies in many of our universities.
Since the EFF’s socialist and African nationalist policies are no different from half a dozen or more unsuccessful African parties, its successes must be due to its leadership, which means Julius Malema. It must be noted that several African countries have been led by figures very much like Malema: African leaders mouthing Marxist jargon and claiming their love for the African masses while driving past them in flashy new Mercedes and Range Rovers, and flaunting their capitalist wealth before them. Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique are examples. If Julius Malema did become president of South Africa, it would set no African precedent. The EFF is after all simply an offshoot of the ANC, having policies little different from those of the ANC, which are heavily rooted in communism. The EFF is just louder and more blatant. They have the same views on capitalism and communism.
Let me first define capitalism and socialism. (Here I use “communism” and “socialism” interchangeably, as all the Russian Marxists did. They called their empire the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”.) Capitalism is an economic system with private property ownership, where ordinary people are free to do business among themselves as they wish, and where they can choose whom to work for or to set up their own businesses if they like. Socialism is an economic system where private property has been abolished, where ordinary people are forced to work for the state, where the state consists of a small bourgeois ruling elite. I can think of no communist leader of a country who was working class. Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Castro, Guevara and Kim Jong-un – all bourgeois to their boots, all despised the working classes and all brutally exploited them. When communists speak about the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, they mean “the bourgeois dictatorship over the proletariat”. Socialists despise the working classes, and the working classes hate socialism. This is why, without exception, workers always flee from communist countries to capitalist countries, and never the other way round.
Karl Marx founded the communist ideology with his 1847 pamphlet, “The Communist Manifesto”. It combined angry language, vivid imagery, some interesting historical ideas and a lot of mumbo jumbo. Beyond demanding the abolition of private property, his prescriptions for the working-class paradise were vague. (Naturally he never ever worked in a factory and probably never even visited one.). He contradicted himself on how to achieve his paradise, sometimes suggesting that the triumph of the proletariat was a ’historic inevitability’ and at other times urging violent conflict to achieve it.
Lenin, by contrast, explained clearly how to do so: the revolution would be led by a tiny, highly disciplined party of professional agitators and enforced by terror. This strategy became known as “Leninist-Marxism” – Lenin’s methods to achieves Marx’s policies. In February 1917, there was a genuine, popular revolution in Russia, brought about by the hardships of the First World War. There were months of uncertainty and confusion. In October, by a lucky turn of events and decisive action by Lenin, his tiny Bolshevik party took over the Russian state. Lenin declared, “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order!” and did just that. He laid down the foundations of modern tyranny, which were copied around the world.
His first action was to set up the apparatus of terror, which later became the KGB. He set about trying to abolish private property and to eradicate private enterprise among industrial workers in the town and farmers in the countryside. The inevitable result was massive bloodshed, economic collapse, famine and starvation. His revolution caused a sensation around the world. Bourgeois elites of “intellectuals” in Western universities and Western newspapers thought he was wonderful – and many still do. African leaders and activists, such as Julius Malema, still worship him, still refer to each other as “Comrade” to show how much they defer to him, and sometimes even call their political structures “politburos”. However, he had two far more important followers: Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler.
Stalin was a disciple of Lenin’s. He was with Lenin from the beginning, always deferred to him and got all his ideas from him. After Lenin died in 1924, Stalin carefully and skilfully took over the Communist Party and the Russian state, and proceeded to execute all his political opponents. He got rid of the gifted, arrogant, petulant Trotsky with ease. In 1928, Stalin implemented full socialism on the farms. His use of the word “socialism” was accurate: it meant the total elimination of private property and of the free market in agriculture. He knew perfectly well that private farmers, owning their own land and selling their products into a free market, will always produce far more food than farm labourers working on a collective farm owned by the state. But he thought it was better to have socialism and starvation than capitalism and abundant food. He collectivised the farms with much brutality and bloodshed. He turned farmers into enforced farm labourers – serfs. He brought back, but in much worse form, serfdom as it was before the Tzar ended it in 1861. As expected, there was mass famine and about ten million people died – especially on the rich soils of the Ukraine.
Hitler, who led the “German Workers National Socialist Party” (Nazi Party), was greatly influenced by Lenin, and studied and copied many of his methods. He too believed in a highly disciplined party of violent fanatics totally obedient to his cause. Like Lenin he believed in resolution by conflict. Like Lenin he hated capitalism. But there were differences of personality and policy. Lenin neither gained nor sought popularity; he didn’t care what people thought of him as long as he got his way; he never engaged in any showmanship or publicity seeking. Hitler, after a failed coup in 1923, realised he could only come to power in a democratic election. So, he sought popularity and publicity, and turned out to be a brilliant orator and showman. He was a true socialist but with the emphasis on racial differences rather than class or economic differences. When he came to power in 1933, he did not nationalise the economy; he simply controlled the big businessmen and told them what to do. This resulted in a far more successful economy than Lenin’s. In China today, there is a similar system, with a socialist government and a capitalist economy. Apartheid, which was a form of socialism too, even having the internal passports of communist Russia, had a version of national socialism. The National Party was in strict control of the government and many aspects of people’s lives, but had race rather than class as the main consideration, and allowed a fair degree of capitalism, which delivered the strongest industrial economy in Africa.
Julius Malema and his inner circle combine many of the ideas, policies and contradictions of both Lenin and Hitler. If you look at Marx’s 10-point plan in his Communist Manifesto of 1847, Hitler’s 25-point programme in 1920, and the EFF’s “seven pillars” in its 2019 manifesto, you will see considerable overlap between the three.
Like Lenin, Malema wants to abolish private property and turn free workers into slaves. For him “Economic Freedom” means economic tyranny, with himself as the tyrant. Like Lenin he despises working class people but unlike Lenin he brazenly displays his contempt for them. He wants them to use public transport, while he drives expensive private cars; they must go to state hospitals while he goes to private ones; their children must go to state schools with black teachers while his go to private schools with white teachers; they must suffer deprivation while he spends a fortune on luxuries and adornments(Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Breitling and Lacoste); they must live in squalid black townships while he lives in a posh suburb of northern Joburg. Like Hitler, he is obsessed with race and nation. Marx said, ‘The working men have no country’. Hitler and Malema would strongly disagree. Malema and his EFF thugs recently invaded restaurants and businesses to sniff out foreign workers, especially Zimbabweans. (Malema cheered Mugabe while he was terrorising and impoverishing black Zimbabweans, sending them fleeing to South Africa, but now he wants to kick them out.).
Like Hitler and unlike Lenin, Malema craves publicity and is a successful showman, drawing cheering crowds. Unlike Hitler, who was sexless, a tee-totaler and a non-smoker and, unlike Lenin who lived a spartan life and cared nothing for material possessions, Malema is obsessed with the carnal and the worldly, with ostentatious shows of luxury goods, expensive possessions, glittering parties and fast living. He not only wants to be rich and privileged, but he wants everybody to know how rich and privileged he is, while at the same time posing as a working-class hero and representative of the oppressed people.
This strange psychology is not unusual among certain African leaders, although I’m afraid it makes Africa a bit of a laughingstock to the outside world. When somebody points out his gross hypocrisy in public, Malema seems taken aback, as if the contradiction between his words and his actions were not perfectly acceptable, and then starts swearing and blustering and threatening. He did this in 2010 when a BBC journalist questioned him about his claims to lead the revolution while living in a rich house in Sandton. He seemed shocked that anybody dare talk to him in this disrespectful way and swore at him, calling him, rather mysteriously, a ‘bloody agent’.
The ANC, whose fundamental economic philosophy is Marxist, as its National Democratic Revolution shows, is weak, corrupt and divided. It would like to copy Robert Mugabe’s expropriation without compensation (EWC) of private property, but needs to change the Constitution to do so, which requires a two-thirds majority in parliament. The EFF refused to vote with it when it tried to do so because its expropriation proposal was not radical enough. Ramaphosa is a feeble leader, without any clear ideas of his own, scared of the militant ANC factions opposed to him such as the RET, and quakes before the jeers and thunder of the EFF.
I am a hopeless political prophet, but I wouldn’t drop dead with amazement if Ramaphosa, shaken by Phala Phala and most anxious about the 2024 elections, gives in to Julius Malema for more radical EWC to accelerate the ANC’s Expropriation Act, passed in Parliament in September. This would embolden the EFF and its many closet supporters in the ANC. Then, perhaps, there could be an amalgamation between the two parties, with Malema eventually emerging as its leader.
Then, would Julius Malema “proceed to construct the socialist order” in South Africa?
[Photo: Shepard Sherbell/Corbis via Getty Images & Image: ©James Ferguson for the Financial Times]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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