TO THE NAKED EYE, EVEN TO TALK about history in reference to an organisation like the EFF, which is hardly a year old, may sound presumptuous. That approach, however, would be taking a very narrow and linear view of history. In truth, the history of the EFF did not begin in July 2013 in Soweto nor in October 2013 at its launch rally in Marikana. In proper perspective, the history of the EFF began in April 1652 with the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck ostensibly to set up a vegetable garden and a refreshment station en route to trade in the East.
It is no coincidence or irony that the Dutch East India Company, under whose auspices Van Riebeeck operated, performed its first action by taking a small piece of land in present-day Cape Town and, as the saying goes, the rest is history. That the EFF champions above all the return of the land clearly demonstrates the connectedness of two events that happened some 361 years apart, the arrival of Van Riebeeck’s crew and the advent of the EFF.
Secondly, Van Riebeeck’s journey was no joy ride. It was in pursuit of what we refer to today as “globalisation” – the idea that capitalist interests are free to roam around the globe to exploit, for profit, the natural and human resources of other lands, conquered either militarily or economically, or both.
The present-day similar exploitation of the mineral resources of South Africa by multinational companies, as well as the concomitant exploitation of predominantly African labour power in the process, can also be traced directly to the same or similar intentions of the Dutch East India Company, without which South African history would certainly have turned out differently and there would have been no EFF as we now know it.
There is one history, connected at different points, or, as Marx and Engels aptly put it in the Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.”
An appreciation of the above provides a short-cut to the understanding of both the class character of any revolution, as well as its internationalist dimensions. Hence, there can be no such thing as socialism in one country! These insights should give a different and broader perspective to the significance of this relatively short book.
Thus, the history of the EFF, or any revolutionary movement for that matter, can really be traced even further back than 1652: from prehistoric times, some millennia BC, through the Bronze Age, the Ancient Empires, European Feudalism and the first wave of Bourgeois Revolutions in Europe. These stages were followed by the rise of Industrial Capitalism and Imperialism until the more modern eras of World Wars and the Cold War, which preceded the recent rise of neoliberalism under the stewardship of Reagan and Thatcher, which was in turn only brought to a halt by the crisis of capitalism in 2007–9. (The latter has brought back some sanity about the role of the state, with even the most ardent neoliberals grudgingly revising their anti-statist dogma.)
All these events and epochs have a direct relevance to the present stage of capitalism in South Africa and elsewhere in the world. Indeed, they similarly have a direct bearing on the state of socialism in South Africa and the world! The South African revolution is embedded in that reality. Arguably, not by coincidence, the attainment of political freedom in South Africa, led by the ruling African National Congress, took place within the context of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc countries and the largely Stalinist regimes that governed them.
This led directly to the abandonment of the two-stage theory in terms of which the ultimate destination was a socialist system anchored on nationalisation, the return of the land and the like, in favour of the more fashionable neoliberal ideological outlook. The rest is history.
In the ensuing 20 years, capitalism itself suffered its own actual or near collapse, ironically being rescued by large doses of state intervention and effective nationalisation of the banking sector.
It is a sign of the failure of the South African ruling elite to read the signs of the current times that they have chosen the politically suicidal route of clinging to right-wing neoliberal dogma in the face of contradicting evidence and the growing suffering of the working class and the poor.
As before, there can be no arresting the wheels of history. The oppressed class will ultimately triumph. No amount of military and police brutality or other forms of repression can defeat an idea whose time has come.
Understanding the emergence of the EFF, in collaboration with like-minded revolutionary forces of the Left, as a direct response to this historical mission, will put your reading of this book in its proper perspective.
This does not pretend to be any more definitive than a particular perspective of history. History is, by its nature, and properly so, contested terrain, even within the EFF itself. This should be encouraged as any fresh or different perspectives, provided they are genuinely and honestly held, can only enrich the never-ending search for the tools of comprehensive analysis that ought to be the constant preoccupation of all those who call themselves revolutionaries.
Happy reading.
Dali Mpofu
EFF: Commissar for Justice and Special Projects
7 March 2014