The great German revolutionary and scholar, Karl Marx, correctly observed that the ruling intellectual force of any society, are the ideas of those who own the economic productive forces, in our epoch, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the economic ruling elite, the bourgeoisie as it were.

Mav Waterstone, in a book co-authored with the equally great revolutionary and libertarian socialist scholar, Noam Chomsky, titled Consequences of Capitalism, takes the correct observation by Marx to its logical conclusion, arguing that the ideas of the ruling elites become what they refer to as “the common sense” of society. In other words, how society, collectively, fathoms and approaches the social, economic, political, and cultural.

It, therefore, becomes necessary that as progressives, we contest this intellectual space, disturb the iniquitous neoliberal intellectual wine and dine, and provide a counter school of thought, that will violently interrupt the neoliberal power structure. To provide a “rude awakening to ideological gimmicks, from their political and philosophical slumber”, as Molaodi Wa Sekake passionately argues.

It is in this context that we pen such a piece, to contest the predominant intellectual force, that is pro-power, the piece will argue that the tenacious attacks on the SRC President of Nelson Mandela University (NMU), comrade Pontsho Hlongwane, are as a result of his ideological grounding, his political affiliation, and the deep-rooted neoliberal ideology that characterizes NMU, which the student populace subconsciously adopts.

The President’s ideological grounding

In an epoch of neoliberal violence, those who occupy themselves with the easy, yet difficult task of thinking, are coerced into succumbing to the anti-black pro-capitalist intellectual force. Their pen is entirely dedicated to ensuring the perpetual dominance of the neoliberal power structure, and the perpetual exploitation of the intellectual and physical labour of the popular classes.

The President chose what is habitually referred to as an “unpopular view”, locating himself within an intellectual cohort that breathes ideas that a diametrically opposed to the hegemonic intellectual force. He stands for ideas which preach non-conformity, the rejection of austerity politics, and the rejection of the perpetual refusal of the existence of the labouring masses.

Upon entering office as the SRC President, he has been a consistent voice, screaming clearance of historical debt, free registration for the poor and free accommodation for the poor. Central to all is the question of Free Education, which the neoliberal power structure passionately and vehemently opposes. Every platform he has taken, whether through his writings or addresses, he always preaches socialist policies, guided by the Marxist-Leninist-Fanonian tools of analysis, which are the guiding theoretical frameworks of the organization that deployed him.

The President’s political affiliation

As a comrade that associates himself with Leninism, it is rather not perplexing that President Pontsho fathoms and appreciates the paramount Leninist intervention of an organized revolutionary working-class party, which differing from Marx, Lenin correctly intervened and guided the global working class which was not organized, about the importance of organizing itself under a revolutionary party. Guided by Marxism, of course, understanding that the enemy is organized and systematic, therefore, it follows logically that they can only be defeated through organized efforts.

President Pontsho, consistent with the Leninist conception of an organized revolutionary working-class party, is a member in good standing, of the organized revolutionary working-class party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), and the Economic Freedom Fighters Students’ Command (EFFSC) – organizations which have been a nightmare for anti-black racism, and capitalism.

Deep-rooted neoliberal ideology at Madibaz

Neoliberalism is the ruling economic force of our epoch. It is therefore not perplexing that liberalism is the ruling intellectual force in all public and private institutions of society. NMU, as a public institution of higher learning, is not spared from the intellectual hegemony of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, as Chomsky and Waterstone argue, is the common sense, in relation to how the staff and students fathom and approach the economic, social, political, and cultural. One of the fundamental principles of neoliberalism is exaggerated individualism. When one is not affected directly, he/she is not bothered, socio-economic and political questions are fathomed through individual lenses, as opposed to structural issues imposed by the prevailing neoliberal power structure. Another principle of neoliberalism is the isolation of the state, the fatuous reduction of the state to an enforcer of the law. Students at NMU completely isolate the state in relation to the demarcation of the problems they are confronted with in their institution. Structural questions are reduced to failures of the Student Representative Council (SRC), as opposed to structural issues imposed by neoliberalism, and the failures of the Department of Higher Education, and its sister institutions.

Another principle of neoliberalism is that money should be the condition for receiving basic life necessities like food, water, shelter, education, healthcare, etc, the student at NMU believes that everyone should pay for their education, if you do not have money, you do not deserve access to education, justifying exclusion.

It is in this context that the persistent, fatuous, iniquitous attacks the President has been subjected to should be understood. His private space is consistently invaded and his private matters paraded in public platforms like Facebook, because intellectually he decided to exist outside what is politically correct. He decided to breathe contra ideas, which make grounds for the imagination of a different world – a world free of poverty, inequality, racism, sexism, anti-blackness. Politically, he has chosen to exist with those who on a day-to-day basis, engage in deliberate and intentional activities that seek to organize the working-class for their emancipation, deliver them to a communist world where they will cease to be exploited and oppressed.

Neoliberal agents of the anti-black university and external counter-revolutionary forces have unleashed an iniquitous campaign against the progressive President. They have taken a stance of advancing propaganda that seeks to discredit the genuine policy proposals the President has been advancing since assuming office. However we are not surprised by these attempts as at some point neoliberal agents raided dustbins of hotels and searched for used condoms, in hopes of discrediting the EFF, neoliberal agents at some point publicly humiliated the CIC, President Julius Malema through making him take out his wallet to check which bankcards he is using, in hopes of linking him to some imaginary funders. If we can narrate all these stories, we can write novels. The President should not be deterred, all this harassment demonstrates that the power structure is shaken by his efforts, and as such, he must forge forward, until victory!

Bonginkosi Shongwe is a member and activist of the EFF/SC

Following the disturbing bloodletting scenes, we witnessed on social media footage in the preceding weeks culminating in what many have correctly called the #PheonixMassacre, the prevailing feeling within the Black community has been a combination of pain, anger, disbelief, stock-taking and also growing calls for justice for the barbarism of Indians in KwaZulu Natal.

Thus, in thinking through the current political situation, the intention of this paper is twofold: (i) to place within proper socio-historical context the organized Indian vigilantism against native African bodies we witnessed in Pheonix as a permanent feature of South Africa’s Black social life. And, (ii) to expose the government’s absurdity in its rhetoric of protecting people’s properties against loss of lives as a logic steeped in bourgeois ideology and a slap in the face of the property-less African masses who make up its largest constituency base.

1. Socio-historical context of violence:

With a heavy heart, I have been thinking through the moral and political implications of the gruesome footage that circulated our social media in the past weeks, events of Indian bodily attacks on poor African masses from the neighbouring townships of Pheonix including heavy-handed mob beatings, random stoppages of passing cars for unwarranted raids, aggressive bodily searches and parading of African women, brazen harassment including verbal threats of alleged ‘suspicious’ Africans, to the torching of cars and houses and the scores of people shot and killed in cold blood. Just from a moral perspective, this violence and its related deaths befits the description of the events in Pheonix as a massacre, proper!

At the outset, it’s important to offset this projected media narrative in its description of what we witnessed in the past two weeks as regrettable events and human fallibility in what is an otherwise socially cohesive society. I want to reject this proposition by arguing that at the heart of the whole Phoenix fiascos lies the question of Blackness and violence as inseparable features in the psychological make-up of contemporary South African society.

In other words, one cannot understand South Africa today without an understanding of the relationship Black bodies have with violence. The regime of violence in the South African body-politic, psyche and cultural fabric is an anthropological phenomenon dating back to the arrival of the settlers.

Conceptually and for the purpose of this paper, I will deliberately confine the epithet “Blackness” as an exclusive designation to mean African people alone. The exclusive use of the term Black will help us make of the events in Pheonix as well as underscore the peculiar pain that Africans have specifically suffered as a group through the racist policies of Bantustans and Homelands which previous governments imposed on Africans/Blacks singularly. Politically, it is central to highlight that Indians in South Africa did not have the contradiction of Homeland/Bantustans confinement with all the socioeconomic conditions it engendered.

Back to violence – from the perspective of telling history carved in conquest, violence was at the founding stage of modern South Africa when white settler colonialists displaced and dispossessed African people of their land and created out of them out of them a conquered slave race with nothing but their labour power to sell in the burgeoning mining industries, white farms, factories and the private white households working as servants. Consequently, the entry of the colonizing force on Azanian soil ushered in a new language of violence through which to mediate relations with the Native African people.

In his seminal work, “Blacks Can’t Be Racist”, a contemporary exponent of Black Consciousness (BC) philosophy, Andile Mngxitama, describes the creation of modern South Africa through a triad process of dispossessions undergirded by the logic of violence:

1. The dispossession of African people’s land as the original sin.

2. The dispossession of African’s labour power (a process Mngxitama explains to have proletarianized Africans), and

3. The dispossession of our sense of Africanness.

This all-encompassing programme of dispossession of the Africans was codified into law with the promulgation of the 1913 Native’s Land Act passed through a whites-only parliament following the defeat of Chief Bambatha in 1906 in the last war of resistance.

Notably, the introduction of apartheid in 1948 as a policy of racial subjection of African people was established, maintained and rationalized through violence. Even in the early 90’s, violence yet again reared its ugly head in the events leading to the birth of the present South African constitution and the democratic project. And two events in particular stand out for lengthy reflection on – the Bisho and the Boipotang massacres, including the government sponsored Black-on-Black violence between Inkatha Freedom Party (a Zulu aligned political enclave) and the African National Congress.

At present – post a democratic breakthrough, the structural logic of violence still by and large defines every facet of South African life and its systems, always revealing itself both in subtle and naked ways. State neglect. Violent classes. Socioeconomic deprivation. Social exclusion. The willed violence of the state, all of these are realities Black people must stave off daily.

The de jure elimination of grand apartheid and the new dispensation’s inability to end this structuralized violence against black bodies speaks to the interesting dynamic of the Pheonix episodes. In the context of oppression, violence is always meted against the oppressed subjects, but post-apartheid South Africa grapples with an anomaly of the singling out of African people in relation to violence. This anomaly compounds matters making it difficult to reconcile in political terms, Indians, as part of what Steve Biko defined as the ‘oppressed group’ in South Africa. Meaning, as people who shared along with the Africans and Coloureds, in the main, the history of racial discrimination, exclusion, social scorn and repression under colonial-cum-apartheid rule.

Perhaps for pedagogic purposes, Biko (the theorist of black consciousness philosophy and anticolonial revolutionary) had theoretically defined blacks as constitutive of the group, that was, by law and tradition, discriminated against. This definition was true for Africans, Indians and Coloureds. It therefore became black consciousness’s strategy amongst these oppressed groups to effect solidarity links and other tactical nuances, as a way of undermining apartheid’s divide and rule logic. Through this approach, Biko sought to unite Africans, Indians and Coloureds in the composite fight against a common enemy – white power and the preservation of white privilege. Since the struggle for national liberation in South Africa was substituted for a vision of democracy, this still places white supremacy as the fundamental contradiction.

The recent Indian violence against Africans in Phoenix is, on the one hand, a war of the oppressed against the oppressed, while on other hand, a disruption to the logic of romantic solidary, thereby projecting Biko’s rubric of blackness as a house of contradictions.

I, therefore, turn to an African-American film critic and theorist, Professor Frank. B Wilderson lll to make sense of the complex nature of the unfolding contradiction, and so will use Wilderson’s analysis in the socio-historical context of South Africa as, quintessentially, a violent project to black(ened) bodies.

Frank Wilderson, a theorist of a black radical tradition loosely assembled under the theory of Afro-pessimism, explains the political ontology of Black bodies as soaked in blackness and its antithesis – anti-Blackness. This framing helps us situate the relations of power, at the level of the libidinal and the political within the framework of anti-Blackness as a structural logic. In other words, a suggestion that although Blacks could relate to Indians at the political level of struggling together against white supremacy and order (as theorized by Steve Biko), they do not/could not however relate at the libidinal level. The inability of the Indian to think Black or relate libidinally to Black pain and suffering highlights the latter’s political ontology he occupies in the world; a logic that makes Indian’s libidinal economy invested in the reproduction of Black bodies as readily available to violence.

In an interview by C. G. Soong, entitled; Blacks and The Master/Slave Relation, Wilderson opines;

“[B]lackness, and even the thing called Africa, cannot be dis-imbricated, cannot be pulled apart from that smaller scale process Patterson talks about with respect to Chinese communities, or Indians or the Choctaw. In other words, there’s a global consensus that Africa is the location of sentient beings who are outside of the global community, who are socially dead.”

It is this ‘global consensus’ that Wilderson talks about in relation to the African/Black sentient being as what generates Indian libidinal investments in the reproduction of black pain and suffering in South Africa’s long history of anti-Black violence. The continued civic strife against Black bodies gives Indian life some structure and coherence.

Wilderson continues;

“That global consensus begins with the Arabs in 625 and it passed on to the Europeans in 1452. Prior to the global consensus you can’t think Black. You can think Ugandan, Ashanti, Ndebele, you can think many different cultural identities, but Blackness cannot be dis-imbricated from the global consensus that decides here is the place which is emblematic of the moment the Choctaw person is spun out from social life to social death. That’s part of the foundation.” (Emphasis mine).

Therefore, the Indian’s cultural superiority complex over Africans as physically expressed through violence and harm at the subjective body-level draws its investment from an anti-Black/anti-African global social order.

In qualitative and material terms, beyond theory and the romance of allyship, the implications politically is that; the recent developments provokes two questions we need to think about post the massacre; (a) the singular structural position of Black/African people at a global space as slaves, and a people who are available to social scorn, racial abuse, cultural mockery and willed violence, and (b) the place of South African Indians at the rendezvous of Black victory, or put differently, what will our relations to Indians be in a liberated Azania! These are the dissimilarities and discontinuities between Frank Wilderson’s analytic lens and the traditional Biko/BC position apropos the Indian question, and situating it within its correct political and theoretical contexts requires a weaving of the two theories.

2. The ANC arrives in Pheonix:

Arriving very late on the scene, a careful reading of the State’s too-little too-late problematic response to the events in Pheonix was evidenced in how the State took up the cudgels of the Indian business owners and white property holders and defended it with a tenacity of an ideologue.

In a typical cold fish style, the head of State, Cyril Ramaphosa, spoke with monotonous singularity, address after address, about how he was going to avenge the victims of looted properties with arrests and state harassment, while paying scant regard to the many victims of Indian mob vigilantism who were subjected to dehumanizing forms of racial profiling and brazen horror.

In overall, the entire response of government has been disparagingly poor and laden with anti-poor and anti-Black rhetoric and threats. But I want to argue that it is not that government failed to give a socially-engaged reading, diagnosis and response to what some have termed a ‘looting spree’, but government has deliberately taken a socially-disengaged position opting to side with the owners of property, the traders, the middle- and upper-class people of South Africa, who are, historically white and Indian.

Thus, the overriding impression one gets from government’s response is that killing is permissible if its presumed to be in the protection of one’s property against alleged vandalism and pursuit of material gain. Giving private civilians legitimacy to deputize functions of law enforcement agencies and fire pistols at African people under the guise of guarding their properties. To hell with the sanctity of human life!

This assumptive logic is anchored on a kind of bourgeois credo that values more the feelings of the market forces and commercial production above human dignity and right to life and protection.

In a society festering with antiblack racism and violence, to give carte blanche to private citizens para-policing functions was both reckless and wrongheaded. It is therefore for this reason that our engagement with the government’s response must always be polemical in the sense of challenging the very basis of its anti-poor and anti-Black narrative which form part of a tyrannical response it has taken to the people of KZN.

Turning a blind eye to the underlying socioeconomic conditions of the many families and communities of the underclass African people, whom, because of the over-the-top lockdown, were left without food on the table and had to fend for themselves is to display signs of an uncaring and irresponsible government.  Furthermore, the State has instead elected to pronounce these people as enemies of government and a people organized around ethnic lines to launch an insurrection and harassed them with army, further alienating the people from any meditative channels of social relief and support.

But like I have argued elsewhere; the ANC is no longer an unwilling bystander in the civic strife inflicted on black bodies, it is now an active enabler using its institutions of operations, advisory boards, political mechanizations, it’s law, and a high-handed tone condemning to physical and social death!