The EFF, like all political parties do to one degree or another, engages in propaganda. That is, the propagation of information and opinion, essentially misleading in nature, designed to persuade or compel people into believing its point of view.
For most political parties, bound by the democratic norms and standards of reason and rationality, the room to manipulate facts and evidence in this way is limited. And so, typically, it boils down to a matter of emphasis, occasional misdirection by omission and a fair dose of hypocrisy.
There is the occasional blatant lie, but for the most part the party line is driven quantitatively — through mass publicity (posters, media statements and adverts) — rather than qualitatively (by actually using misinformation to poison the well). Otherwise, conventional political parties attempt to win the battle of ideas in the obvious way — by winning arguments.
The EFF, however, is a different kettle of fish. Heavily influenced by revolutionary thinkers such as Lenin, and home to a great many fascist impulses, the lies and myths it generates are a far blunter, cruder affair. The EFF cares little for those implicit rules and boundaries reason demands, and which we take for granted. It manipulates debate itself by introducing highly divisive conspiracies into it, which then take on a life of their own. And it is very good at it.
There is an argument to be made that the best counter-measure to the EFF’s propaganda is to simply ignore it. But that seems to be a discipline the mainstream media is unable to master
The EFF’s power of persuasion, then, lies not in its ability to win arguments but in how it shapes the parameters of any given debate. Once it has done that successfully, it has proven almost impossible for the South African public mind to argue outside the frame of reference it has introduced. And so it controls debate at a base level, by appealing to base instincts. And always it is at the centre of whatever discussion follows.
There is an argument to be made that the best counter-measure to the EFF’s propaganda is to simply ignore it. But that seems to be a discipline the mainstream media is unable to master. It is in many respects trapped by its own condition: traditional media platforms are dying a slow, painful death, and the desperate need to sell has created an environment — one exacerbated by the advent of instantaneous online news — never before so prone to rewarding personality politics and intrigue, at the expense of reason and evidence.
It’s a sorry state of affairs, yet one entirely suited to the EFF’s agenda. When the history of the current decade is written up, it will be clear that the greatest facilitators and incubators of the EFF’s hate and lies was the media itself, ostensibly vested in critically interrogating them but, in truth, the vehicle through which they were exaggerated and spread.
That is a remarkable feat for a party with just 6.6% of the vote. Normally, any successful political propaganda machine relies on power to achieve its aims. The EFF does not control the public broadcaster and has no news publication deferential to its authority. But it doesn’t need that. It has used its notoriety to achieve the exact same end. In quantitative terms, it might as well be in power, given the extraordinary degree to which it is able to define and dominate debate.
What, then, are some of the characteristics of EFF propaganda? They are worth identifying because, if understood, it becomes easier to differentiate misinformation from argument, and reason-based opinion from baseless or irrelevant misdirection and manipulation. Here are some of the main techniques the EFF uses.
The first characteristic is that the EFF’s language is totalising. It operates in a world of absolutism. There is no ambiguity or subtlety, only total certainty. Its enemies are absolute enemies, irredeemable and permanently tainted. All white people are evil; all black people are oppressed. The West is malevolent; the DA racist. Capitalism is without virtue.
You will thus rarely find in EFF language any measure or proportion, or the accompanying phrases: “Some white people”, “this element of capitalism” or “this particular DA position”. To do that would require the EFF to be grounded in reality, defined as it is by difference and inconsistency. But the EFF is caught up in a fundamentalist fantasy that bears little resemblance to the real world. And so it has abandoned perspective and qualification.
Following on from this is the second characteristic of EFF propaganda: its effect on debate is binary and divisive. The implication inherent to a totalising worldview is that morality — good and bad — is similarity prescribed. People (enemies and allies) are either heroes or villains; their actions absolutely good or bad.
No person, a human being capable of both virtue and vice, is anything but the total embodiment of the moral archetype assigned to them. They can never escape it, and are permanently bound by it. It predetermines their attitudes and behaviour, whatever they may be.
In this way, the EFF is able to set society against itself and destroy the idea of the individual. No Indian can be seen, first and foremost, as anything but racist, for example; no capitalist as anything but greedy and ethically corrupt. The universe is reduced to a battleground for competing archetypes — in the grand scheme of things, the oppressed and the oppressor — and each person is assigned a preordained character and nature they are inescapably subservient to.
The issue of land reform can be reduced to a phrase, for example. With that, debate becomes impossible. There can be no concession or compromise because every point is reduced to nothing more than the extension of a binary choice between truth and falsehood.
To help achieve this, the party relies on slogans and symbols, in the tradition of history’s best propagandists — the third characteristic of EFF propaganda. Ridicule is central to this. Enemies are given demeaning and patronising nicknames, designed to belittle them and reduce their standing in the public eye. Heroes are worshipped and elevated to the level of a deity, only ever quoted in reverential terms, and their flaws or shortcomings never mentioned or dwelt upon.
Symbols are used in much the same fashion. As symbols tend, from first principles, to defy reason — they are typically metaphors for a more emotional position — they are given disproportionate weight and significance. For the greater their significance, the harder it becomes to argue rationally about them, until they are entirely detached from reason: metonyms for nothing more than a pure, base impulse: hate or pain, fear or love. To oppose them is thus to oppose emotion itself.
Supplementing this the fourth characteristic of EFF propaganda: rhetorical shorthand and the reduction of the complex to the simple. Because the world is complex, it naturally works against propaganda. Reason demands proportion and qualification, and that sort of complexity makes absolutism incredibly difficult. But the EFF simply ignores this.
The issue of land reform can be reduced to a phrase, for example. With that, debate becomes impossible. There can be no concession or compromise because every point is reduced to nothing more than the extension of a binary choice between truth and falsehood.
It is for this reason the EFF is so weak on economic policy. It simply does not have the intellectual infrastructure to deal with the highly sophisticated and complex world of fiscal and monetary policy. The EFF cannot tell you if interests rates should go up or down, by how much the wage bill should be cut or whether the debt to GPD ratio is a problem. It has not the faintest idea.
Nor does it care. The economy is simply a piggy bank to the EFF, and the integrated global market just a shopping mall. Money goes in, money goes out. It cares only about metaphors for its condition: the fuel price or e-tolls. And its economic policies just superficial gimmicks — like state banks — that completely ignore the fundamentals.
Underpinning this is the fourth characteristic of EFF propaganda: it is teleological in nature. Built into the EFF’s messaging is the belief that SA in on an inevitable path to a predetermined outcome, namely, revolution and a socialist state. It is akin to a kind of religious belief in conviction.
This a profound weakness in EFF thought. The party simply cannot adapt to any current-affairs development or circumstance that runs contrary to its grand analysis. Where events do not fit the model, they are forced to comply with it, so that all decisions and developments are framed, interpreted and understood in a very particular way.
In practical terms, indoctrinated by such socialist thought, the EFF believes if the formula for revolution is applied to SA, SA will inevitably undergo a revolution. Thus, revolution is the lens through which everything from credit-ratings downgrades to Life Esidimeni must be understood.
The fifth characteristic of EFF propaganda is that it seeks to exploit contradiction. As alluded to, all parties do this but for the EFF, any contradiction is much more than a mere hypocrisy — it is a potential fracture in society itself. If enough energy is poured into it, it can be forced to break open and, again, set society against itself. Thus, ANC internal factionalism plays a disproportionate role in EFF propaganda. It seeks to constantly turn any contradiction into a determining divide.
The sixth and final core characteristic of EFF propaganda is that it is expedient and thus contradictory. This might seem to negate everything that has followed above but, in truth, it is entirely consistent with it. To make sense of it, one must appreciate that the EFF lives completely in the moment. The moment is everything, there is no past; or, at least, the past is merely a means to legitimate some contemporaneous end and to be manipulated for that purpose.
All of the EFF’s propaganda is ruthlessly and brutally fashioned in this way. It is absolute and totalising in any given moment. And in any given moment, all of history can be bent to justify its current position. That position might well change tomorrow, and indeed it often does, but then reality will simply be reinterpreted so that it fits. Heroes can become villains, truth can become falsehood, enemies can become allies. It matters not — only the moment matters.
Because SA is generally an ahistorical society, and the media profoundly myopic, the EFF gets away with so much murder on this front; at least, much more than it should. The media has to constantly be reminded about what the EFF said yesterday, in order to ground its current position in some context.
The EFF can thus declare the constitution its “Bible”, but also decry it. It can declare the DA must be unseated in Nelson Mandela Bay, but worked with it in Johannesburg. It can say it made a mistake in voting for the current public protector, and describe her as “dangerous” and a risk to “the very constitutional work it has to combat state corruption”, and then legitimate her office by lodging a complaint with it to invest Pravin Gordhan on that very issue.
There is, thus, no principle by which you can ever evaluate the EFF from a philosophical perspective, at least over time, for every principle lives or dies by the purpose it serves in the moment.
Reading these characteristics, set out in stark terms, it would seem easy enough to distinguish the EFF’s propaganda from run-of-the-mill political communication. Its language is peppered with the requisite indicators: the absolute, all-encompassing racial stereotypes, the infantile nicknames and moral slander, the all-determining and socialist utopia that defies both complexity and economic reason, the slogans and the omnipresent hypocrisy.
But it all counts for nothing when brought together. Together it is theatre, an always-terrible, every-entertaining and interminable grand show, put on for the media, which sells tickets for it on an unprecedented scale.
That it is all propaganda is unquestionable. No person is the replica of a collective archetype, the veracity of no argument is determined by the character of the person advocating it, socialist policies have profound economic implications that cannot be wished away by sheer belief and the value of principle rests on consistency not expedience.
But there it is, blatant and ubiquitous. The EFF have come up with the greatest post-democratic formula for demagoguery and unreason. That it has proven so successful does, however, necessitate the question: is the problem the EFF, or the audience?
• Van Onselen is the head of politics and government at the South African Institute of Race Relations.
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