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Strategically arranged facts tell us that totalitarianism is at bay — but be careful about what you choose to believe

Ismail Lagardien
By Ismail Lagardien
9 Oct 2024
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It’s always a good thing to approach facts with caution, to look at who produced the facts and understand that facts do not fall from the sky into patterns — they are arranged by people for particular purposes.

It’s probably too soon to celebrate, but it does seem like South Africa has moved away from the prospect of the totalitarianism that the EFF represented before last May’s election, and the nativism/ethno-nationalism of the uMkhonto Wesizwe (MK) party. At least for now, it does.

If the statistical data produced and assembled by the Social Research Foundation is anything to go by, the EFF has been losing more support over the weeks and months since their losses in the last poll. Jacob Zuma’s MK party also seems to be on a downward slide. The references to data produced and assembled are important. We will get back to that below.

The key findings of the Social Research Foundation research was that “the MK and the EFF are off-putting to 46% of all those polled — 38% of blacks, 64% of coloureds, 72% of Indians and 85% of whites. Twenty-five percent of those polled, across the race groups, would support parties such as MK and the EFF if they did not include “corrupt or compromised” people. 

Loyalists and thinkers who are organically linked to both movements have rejected the findings. This is unsurprising. The data supports the decline, and at the level of perception, Julius Malema and the EFF do seem to have run out of steam, and wherever they have been part of governance, things have, well, not gone very smoothly.

Violence part of EFF’s identity


Actual violence or the threat of violence is explicitly part of the identity of the Fighters. The leaders of the EFF are apparently either “corrupt or compromised”. We should probably note that there have been no legal decisions of guilt. It’s hard to believe that there will be any such decisions.

What has been apparent over the decade or so before last May’s election, has been a creeping fascism and distinct totalitarianism and authoritarianism under the cultish leadership of Malema, and of MK’s patriarch.

The EFF’s slide into the politics of revenge, of ethno-nationalism and xenophobia and a policy of biblical punishment of non-Africans have been detailed in this space over and again. It was clear, after the last election, that the electorate had no stomach for the awful and quite tragic communism that the EFF represented.

Theirs is not a socialism or communism that seeks a better society, it is more like a smash-and grab-communism, something that is, quite ironically, more like the smash and grab of the years immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and which (finally) brought Russian society to its knees (by the mid-1990s).

Whether you like it or not, whether or not we agree, Russia has made significant social and political economic progress since then. Thirty years ago, Russia’s per capita GDP was $2,662 ‎(1994), and this year, according to the International Monetary Fund, it is about $14,300 (about R251,000) – notwithstanding Western sanctions and the war on Ukraine.

Anyway, the EFF in particular appear to be in retreat. They are licking their wounds of electoral defeat, and the bleeding head wound of Floyd Shivambu’s departure. What, then, does the data say?

The production and assembly of facts


It’s always a good thing to approach facts with caution, and to look at who produced the facts. Note that I used the International Monetary Fund’s data on Russia (above), which should make at least 10% of South Africans happy…

The main takeaways from the Social Research Foundation findings echo some of the public perceptions about the Government of National Unity (GNU, which is not beyond criticism, see here and here) — that it has brought a semblance of political economic and financial stability, and that more people are rallying behind Cyril Ramaphosa. That’s what the available data say.

There is, of course, a lot of tension and friction within the GNU, and Ramaphosa has to make sure that gains are spread more equally across society. The biggest opposition to the GNU is ideological, and rests on easy phrases like “neo-liberalism” or “white monopoly capitalism” or control by “the Oppenheimers” or the “Stellenbosch Mafia”.

We have to accept that these are ideological claims, but it’s safe to say the ideologues would present them as facts.

This is consistent with opinion-makers who make firm factual statements without providing evidence. That works only as rhetoric, as provocation and bluster.

There’s an old lesson that never gets tiresome; if you make an absolute factual statement, provide evidence to support it (see, for instance, this bold statement), and if you make a theoretical statement or hypothetical claim, make sure it hangs together.

Credibility


I would add to this that personal opinions and commentary are just that — they are personal opinions and comments. The credibility, strengths and weaknesses of opinions hang on whose opinions they are.

The Peter Brothers, status quo patriots of note, have their following among people with whom they share ideological solidarity and affiliation, and who present their positions as “common sense”, “objective” and “fact-based”.

The “progressive caucus” has its own loyalists, and they believe that theirs are the only true revolutionary ideas and policies.

I always thought that progressive people were those who looked at the broad sweep of history and made policies that kept society in touch with more positive, just and equitable shifts in the world. I was wrong.

The South African progressive caucus is a reactionary force, made to look good by classical liberals, and people who don’t see race, the “race-blindness that is a most insidious form of racism and perpetuation of white supremacy”.

The statement above, that evidence is required to support claims of fact, applies also, perhaps more so, to people who would imagine that “facts speak for themselves” and that they are not purposefully produced and assembled to tell particular stories.

In the world in which we live (not the natural world, although the great thing about science is the willingness to be proved wrong) there is no such thing as facts that “speak for themselves”. We purposefully produce facts that make us feel good or smart, that tell the stories we want to tell, and exclude facts that are inconvenient.

It really depends on what stories you want to foreground, or promote, and which ones you consider less important or irrelevant.

Stubborn and flawless whiteness


The Social Research Foundation did not emerge from the ether, like the mythical “invisible hand”, and accidentally find itself on the right side of history. It is part of the wingspan of that great bird of stubborn and flawless whiteness, and nostalgia for a time when the country was “in good hands”. 

Much like the way that aggressive “civil rights movements” like AfriForum and Solidarity, leading thinkers and intellectuals in “think tanks” (or even Orania, for that matter) were notably absent during the country’s darkest periods, the Social Research Foundation and that hulking body of the South African Institute for Race Relations has been trying really hard, and they have been allowed, to place themselves on the right side of history.

Their most recent panics are that South Africa is “glorifying Hamas”, or “flirting with Russia” or losing the West or some such hysteria…

These intellectuals, as written previously, are the ones who produce and assemble data so that we, all of us, are expected to fall in line behind transnational class interests with interconnected networks across the Global South.

They have more in common with their interlocutors and funders in centres of power, from New York to Tel Aviv and Singapore, than they do with South Africa, where their money buys influence and their knowledge is presented free from criticism – and anyone who disagrees is a shill for, let me see: Iran, Russia, Turkey, Hamas, the Taliban, Isis, Venezuela, Cuba and, you know, those countries that are the enemies of the good people in the West.

As for the receding threat of totalitarianism, we should probably find time to exhale. DM

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