We’re fast approaching the month that celebrates one of the biggest and noted feminist actions in our country, and so it is only fitting that I open the month with a talk about something that has affected women for centuries and still does even in the present day, the legalisation of abortions. In South Africa, termination of pregnancy in the first trimester is legal. Be that as it may, there is still a lot of stigma and victimisation of women particularly young women when it comes to termination of pregnancy or abortion as it is commonly known.

The Zuma administration surprised the country when termination of pregnancies for girls as young as twelve were legalised, whilst the legal age for partaking in sexual activities is sixteen. It left the country in dismay and at the centre of it all was and still is the question of morals and some sort of moral high ground that everyone is expected to gravitate towards.

Recently there has been an uproar around the pieces of legalisation concerning termination of pregnancies, illegal abortion clinics, the propaganda around abortion and the exclusion of transgender persons when it comes to the conversation around termination of pregnancy. The “Heartbeat Bill” of the state of Alabama, was at the centre of this conversation. The bill advocates that a woman cannot terminate a pregnancy at six weeks, because the foetus already has a heartbeat.

This uproar brought about a conversation that a lot of people have been avoiding and would much rather not have, because of, of course the moral high ground that everyone is expected to gravitate towards. This then begs the question, whose morals and whose moral high ground? Why is it that you’re able to shove your own moral beliefs in my face, but can’t take the fact that as a human being I have the right to choice?

My overall point is, if I were to be atheist your argument about religion and moral beliefs wouldn’t matter to me, because science already confirms that I did not kill anyone. Legally and scientifically a foetus is not considered to be its own person when it is not viable. This is when the foetus is still in its embryo-blastocyst-foetal stage.

Let me take you to a little biology class. After fertilisation (the sperm cell has fused with the egg cell), we now have what we call an embryo. The embryo then develops by multiplication of cells that form a cluster of cells that is now called a blastocyst. The cells then continue to specialise and become different parts of the body, as these cells are specialising the foetus is then formed. At this stage, the foetus is still not considered to be viable, because if you were to take it out of the mother’s womb and put it in an incubator, the foetus would not be able to survive on its own. The survival of any living being is not determined by the heartbeat but rather by the brain and its development. Without the brain the heart itself cannot function, so the biggest thing that makes a person be a living being first and foremost is their central nervous system which is the brain and the spinal cord, and in the early foetal stages the central nervous system in the foetus is not even by a long shot close to be being properly developed. That is viability.

So, all the slurs of being a murder from your everyday pro-lifers are nothing but a swing at you to attempt making you feel guilty about making a choice concerning your body and your capacity to decide the state of your own readiness or just not wanting a child. In the eyes of the law, with the number of months within which you can terminate a pregnancy, termination is as good as having an organ transplant or just another medical procedure done.

The other thing, which is by far the biggest at the forefront of this conversation, is choice. Termination of pregnancy is a choice. It is a choice that every person can have over their body. Women have the right to choose whether they are physically ready to carry a child to full term or not. Pregnancy is a very dangerous and strenuous period, both physically and mentally to the pregnant. So, it requires the woman to be ready on all fronts. The biggest injustice would be seeing a woman endanger herself in carrying a child whilst she knows very well that she can’t.

The biggest injustice would be seeing a woman forced to face a fear and danger to her life that will scar her for the rest of her life if not taken by it, when she is not ready to do so. The biggest injustice would be seeing a woman forced to carry a child when she knows that she is not equipped to do so. The biggest injustice would be seeing a woman forced to carry a child, when she didn’t want to, when she didn’t need to, when she shouldn’t have to, when she could have definitely chosen not to.

Only an incubator can’t choose to take into storage or not. Shulamith Firestone, the cofounder of Redstockings which held the first public speak-outs on abortion believed that oppression of women had its basis in biology itself, and that women would not be truly liberated until they freed themselves from the biological imperative of giving birth. I strongly believe that I don’t need to quote a famous radical feminist to tell you that we as women, only because we are able to carry and give birth to a child we are certified to having to carry one.

We as women do not need to have something as tragic as rape and sexual assault happen in order for us to have a sensible enough reason to tap out of having children. If men get to have a choice to opt out of a pregnancy or opt out of having and taking care of a child, then surely women should be offered the same courtesy too. Termination of pregnancy is one of the options to achieve such. As it stands in South Africa, the number of single mothers is way higher than the number of single fathers.

Even the number of children growing up with single mothers is higher than the number of children growing up in a home with both mother and father, or with the two co-parenting. Women have no other option but to stay with their children, whilst men leave them without a second thought. Even in the rarest of moments when the woman relinquishes herself of any responsibilities to the child, the child is most likely to end up with the family of the father than the father himself.

It is rather quite difficult to carry a child for nine months and give that child up for adoption. Whilst there are chances that your child will have a good life and be happy, there will be repercussions later in your and the child’s life. In most cases the child will come back seeking answers as to why you had to give her up for adoption. Whilst she had a very good life, but the fact that the person who carried her for nine months and went through hours of labour did not love her enough to keep her will still psychologically scar the child, or at least the thought of it being a possibility no matter the reassurance of it not.

This is a lifelong trauma that you’re dooming a child who did not ask to come into this world to, a child you could have decided to not bring into this world, trauma and psychological torment for you and the child that could have been avoided. In anyway pro-lifers would much rather go around preaching their morals than adopt a child, offer a sandwich to a homeless person or give a packet of sanitary towels to a young girl who can’t afford them.

We must remember that children are a blessing to others, and to others they’re so much of a blessing that why would a mother want to bring a child into a world that is so messed up, a world that the mother herself is still trying to understand and conquer or a world where the mother still can’t afford.

Either way, everyone should be afforded a chance to choose whether they want to have extra responsibility, someone else that will be a priority and someone else who, once is born, the state will do everything in its power to put his or her best interests first.

In this piece I want to say from the outset and readily admit that many comrades in the EFF tend to show greater affinity towards Marxist scholarship ahead of an African-centered Black ontological body of knowledge embodied in the thoughts of Frantz Omar Fanon. 

This apparent affinity towards Marx and Lenin ahead of Fanon or the entire Black discourse we later discern that it doesn’t allow and give space to different characters informing the EFF’s ideological grounding and revolutionary gestures (actions, programs, character) to speak for themselves.

In this pro-Marx-Lenin peddling there is a deliberate relegation of Fanon and his intellectual discourses centered around his conception of blackness as a problematique in the world to begin with. However of late we’ve seen how even events that shape Blackness somehow getting explained from behind the prism which is anchored upon the fundamental framework of Marxism.

Put differently, a Marxist-Leninist enthusiast often has a difficult time understanding the development of Black history, politics, socialization, spirituality etc., and other modes of cognizing and Being in that they have not been exposed to it. There are many bodies of knowledges that can explain a single subject, some pointing to different apparatus, variables and methodologies. 

My contestation to the article under reply in this piece therefore is on the advanced Marxist historical dialectical conceptual framework and its purported Universal relevance or applicability to our context by Siseko Kosani’s recent piece titled: “Dialectics of Historical Materialism”. 

When we engage the piece by Kosani, and without getting stuck in all its philosophical labyrinths, we bump into its first conceptual lapse.  

This conceptual slippage is an open inability to appreciate the EFF’s dynamic ideological character that draws from a multiplicity of schools of thought as embodied by Marx, Lenin and Fanon. 

In a way that to over-emphasize one character’s voice over the other is a choice that must be made with care and razor-sharp precision. For instance, on the question of Parliament and the Revolution we know that a Leninist analysis is clearer and more useful. In the same way we have an overall Marxist strategy for revolutionary change and the socialization of the means of production. 

But importantly, Marxists we know are guilty of relegating the race issue and condemn it below their material/economic/class exploitation of phenomena. They do this by arguing that racism is either an epiphenomenon of economic exploitation and/or a ruse to commission racialized economic exploitation. And this is where we part ways with Marxist analysis and its ideological progenitor, Leninism.

Through the unfolding decolonial project of Africa that has been carried out at a discursive level, what we’ve realized through engaging in this decolonial discourse is that the internal voices of the Third World falls outside the traditional framework of European thought and great power politics, more so Marxist thought. 

And in the past we’ve seen a deluge of opinion pieces written in attempts to settle and put to rest what has been a long-standing ideological debate between Marxists and Blackists on questions relating to the explanation of human development from a materialist and dialectical historical account. 

Siseko’s piece chases a Marxist conception of dialectical materialism and is therefore a welcomed and necessary initiative. It adds flavour and energy into enriching the ongoing discourse to account for historical developments and contexts.

Moreover, I think it also highlights an important revelation to us, the party. And such revelation is that of two polar opposite schools of thought dominant in shaping the EFF body politics and language, the Orthodox Marxist cabal led by Deputy President, Floyd Shivambu and the almost forsaken leaderless Fanonian School. 

It’s important as we shall see momentarily to parcel the party organizational ideological infrastructure into the Radical Left cohort and the stand-alone Fanon engaged in a dialectical discourse with Marxism-Leninism as a conversational partners. 

One of the dilemmas facing the organization and ideologues in the party is how to reconcile these two schools while remaining truthful to the party’s conceptualization of the central contradiction. 

Fanon we know differs with Marx on defining the central contradiction. He ipso facto differs with Marx even on the question of dialectical materialism as a framework to explain the development of humanity. Fanon strongly believed that in the world today, the history of Capital was the history of black subjection. And the history of black subjection has its roots within racial slavery. 

So when we take this route apropos the understanding of History, that is, taking slavery as an ontological precept or basis structuring black positionality it disarticulates Marx’s dialectical historical analysis. 

Let’s now juxtapose Fanon with a Marxist position on the history of development. Marx held an arrogant view which posited that the history of all existing societies was the history of class warfare. 

Fanon holds a different position. In the Wretched of the Earth he wrote the following and said: 

“This world is divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species. The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, and the immense difference of ways of the life never come to mask the human realities. When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic substructure is also superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you’re reach because you’re white, you’re white because you’re rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to deal with the colonial problem. Everything up to and including the very nature of pre-capitalist society, so we’ll explained by Marx, must here be thought out again. In the colonies, the foreigner coming from another country imposed his rule by means of guns and machines. In defiance of his successful transplantation, in spite of his appropriation, the settler still remains a foreigner. It is neither the act of owning factories, nor estates, nor a bank balance which distinguishes governing classes. The government is racist first and foremost those who come from elsewhere, those who are unlike the original inhabitants, the “Others”. (Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth)

What Fanon demonstrate to us here is the inapplicability of a Marxist assumptive logic vis-a-vis the totality of the Black Question. 

Remaining Central to Black Slavery as the original organizing logic designed to thingify black bodies we’re drawn to a different conclusion to that of Marx. 

While black slavery developed alongside a burgeoning Capitalism and the rapid colonization of the continent (an account missing in Marxist theoretical cartography) the structural positioning of the black slave paved the way for the genesis of the white bourgeois subject. 

In simple terms, we can say to be white was not to be a slave. To be a slave was to be Black and define or guarantee white livelihood. Hence Fanon’s incisive analysis that in the colonies, the cause is the consequences, you are rich because you are white, and you are white because you are rich. Where the black was, the white bourgeois subject came into being.

Therefore, based on the above exposition we can see Marx’s conception of dialectical materialism and history fails dismally to discuss the configuration of white supremacy as a historical contradiction that emerged with slavery for purposes of reorienting a fair critique for its foundational assumptive logic – the specificity of anti-black racism. 

Stated differently, Marxism and its dialectical conception of history is unethical because it conceals and puts a blanket over our plight. There is an a priori deliberate omission of a big chunk of discourses that accounts for the black history written in the canvas of our bodies.

Fanon in essence says that Black suffering cannot be analogized. It is not reducible to some uni-linear historical account of class struggle. So fuck Marx and other white scholar’s ideas that evades the real Genesis of colonial problems and the race axiom in preference of the economic reasons and other facades. Their dialectics is a failed dialectic. It has failed to un-blacken us against the onslaught of anti-black racism and performative violence. And this quite frankly exposes the deep seated racism and anti-blackness in Marxist scholarship.

We need a renewed sense of commitment to the ideals of Frantz Fanon and to redefine his Black Consciousness as a theory of praxis. We must raise the Fanonian school of thought as the commanding ideological line of the party. 

We need to reposition Fanon’s conceptualization of Black Consciousness as a philosophy that synthesises the pragmatics of dialectical materialism with the spirituality of our Blackness as mapped out historically, our Humanism, our own Ubuntu/Botho, if we are to achieve our quest for a true humanity.

We cannot find this in Marx and we neither can we find this in Lenin. We need to look to Fanon, and in the party we must raise the Fanonian School of thought as the commanding ideological line of the party in our efforts to reclaim our lost Humanity. Comrades let us listen carefully to the lone voice of Fanon.