PATRICK BULGER | A consumerist manifesto: a nod to Marx, a wink to Vuitton

Even in 2023, a gloomy mugshot of Karl Marx still glowers over proceedings at Luthuli House, the ANC’s headquarters next door to the now-demolished Elizabeth Hotel, the watering hole over the road from The Star newspaper. Comrade Karl would have approved of the neighbourhood, with his fondness for the bottle, cheap cigars and dissent giving him plenty in common with the boozy sub-editors of that formerly august organ.

Thanks to André de Ruyter, the former Eskom CEO, we are reminded that the Great Unshaven German One oversees all secret rites and rituals at Luthuli House, his fuzzy mug probably costing us at least two stages of load-shedding. Investors apparently told De Ruyter they hadn’t heard the sort of Marxist language they hear in South Africa since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Achtung baby! We’re an ideological throwback. A living fossil.

Marx has been blamed for a lot of things, but this is the first time he’s been directly implicated in the fiasco at Eskom. And Lenin? Yes, him too. Thanks to De Ruyter, there’s been a lot of confusion about whether calling each other “comrade” is sufficient indication that the red menace has taken root and what its influence may be, if any.

Maybe the confusion arises from our habit of dressing up tired and discredited European political forms and practices as something new and revolutionary, customising and localising imported ideas and giving them a lekker twist while we’re about it.

Take the example of the apartheid government, many of whose leaders were Nazi sympathisers during World War 2. The attraction of “scientific’’ racial theories offered convenient cover for a racially-ordered reich, while lebensraum and the Herrenvolk dovetailed with white supremacy and land grabs.

Apartheid prime minister BJ Vorster even spent time in an internment camp, in Koffiefontein in the Free State, studying Mein Kampf. He was joined by that other noted classical scholar, Hendrik van den Bergh, later his head of security. After the war, but mainly because Hitler lost, the National Party government that came to power in 1948 made up with the British Royal establishment, itself largely pro-Nazi.

To suggest to the ANC that it should shed outdated notions of socialism and the language of struggle is like telling the Catholic Church to drop the likely story of how the Virgin Mary came to be with child. A heresy.

So the replication of communist slogans and cultish practices by the ANC won’t be the first time in South Africa that a nationalist movement has appropriated from Europe the symbols that it thinks legitimise its rule, that it “borrows from the poetry of the past”, to quote from one of Marx’s less dense essays.

To suggest to the ANC though, that it should shed outdated notions of socialism and the language of struggle is like telling the Catholic Church to drop the likely story of how the Virgin Mary came to be with child. A heresy.

Apart from historical reasons for the ANC’s fondness for communist regalia, political liturgy and creed-driven catechism, there are practical reasons for its reluctance to more openly parade its neoliberal uniform. For one thing, it’s embarrassing for a revolutionary government to enjoy as warm and fraternal relations with the World Bank as it does with Venezuela.

Marx may feature large at Luthuli House, but it’s mostly just a show to delude followers into thinking that the ANC is still revolutionary in its intent, if not its practices.

Take the high-living occupants of Luthuli House, the comrades who’ve so excited De Ruyter’s imagination. With their top-of-range vehicles, homes, designer clothes and expensive watches and gadgets on display, who wouldn’t want to be a socialist? A local twist on Marx’s theory of surplus value?

For my part, thinking of socialism reminds me of lentils, which used to be the staple diet of all middle-class white trendies united against racism and capitalist exploitation (which is having a job). Washed down, and then again, with Tassies from a box designed especially for lumpenproletariat aesthetic sensibilities.

Is it true that habitual adherence to a hollow form of pantomime Marxism inculcates in believers an exaggerated faith in the ability of the state? A distrust of free-market philosophy, of enterprise? Possible, but the South African experience of apartheid capitalism is unlikely to turn the Free Market Foundation into a mass movement any time soon.

Old habits die hard. There are some in the ANC who regard liberation a la 1994 as a dress rehearsal for the real thing and a stepping stone to a socialist society. But for most, the pictures of Marx act as a sort of Linus blanket, a comfort from the past, but hardly much good against the chill winds of the future.

Marx saw class conflict as the engine of history. He wrote a book called Das Kapital that was so boring even he didn’t bother to finish writing it. Lenin tore several chapters out of it to help him seize power in Tsarist Russia without the hassle of a capitalist “stage’’ of history. Mao Zedong followed a similar strategy and called it socialism “with Chinese characteristics”.

So here we have communism with “South African characteristics”, but it’s strictly IMF-approved. We talk like Che Guevara but act like Elon Musk. We pretend we’re Cuba but only to get more cigars.

We’re the world’s leading champagne socialist state and to prove it we’ll kit ourselves out in Louis Vuitton and drive the most expensive Mercs we can’t afford. More rev than revolution. And top of the range, please. Any colour will do, as long as it’s red.